adventures in meeboland

02 December 2009 @ 03:21 pm

in china, still here.
my mind, still here.
mental anguish caused by environment, yep.

it's been a while since i've posted. maybe it's because i told myself that i would post when something worthy of postage occurred. of course things have happened, but my attitude towards the passing events seems to be leaning in the "meh" direction.

thankfully, zack has kept up with some of his journaling habits so that we know what we did here. i would like to add to his conor story that i threw conor out of the apartment (literally. i didn't realize how beefy i can be when i'm angry) after he woke me up. i tossed him into the elevator and pressed 13, and he was gone. zack was a champ and cleaned up a lot of glass last night because he was afraid that i would cut myself in the morning when getting ready for school.

i agree with zack: it's good to have some stories about the out-of-the-ordinary. perhaps it's best that i don't journal about these things, that way when we come home and talk about china constantly to all of you out there, you can't say "i know this one already, i read it on the ole lj n'at." (that's how you'll say it, too. don't argue.)

that settles it then. no more posting from me. i don't want to ruin the in-person story-telling.

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01 August 2009 @ 02:33 pm

things worth mentioning

it's been a good while since i've thrown anything out into livejournal space. sorry. i just haven't been motivated to do so. instead of putting my life events into a flow/chronological order, i'm just going to put things in a bulleted list format. let's call it

things worth mentioning:

-there are new pictures on photogoodsfromsarah.shutterfly.com

-i have a new hobbie/time consumer. i have joined the language forum on thefreedictionary.com there are a lot of interesting posts/discussions and it has helped me immensely. if you are severely bored, check it out! my name is ameebolah on there as well.

-we bought fish. we started with 4, now we're down to 2. their names are mr. bockbagock and mrs. fishbournern. we can't find little pebbles for the tank. so, they're swimming around in their own filth and water. i feel like a bad mom.

-we planted some seeds a few weeks ago. the only one (and i mean one seed) that germinated is the zinnia. i hope that it lives.

-zack bought a pretty water plant for me that had flowers that looked like hearts. we didn't buy any plant food for it. it's almost dead. poo.

-my birthday was last week and i had to work all day. the school bought me a cake and sang to me! my students made cards and wrote surprise messages on the white boards before i came into the room. my adult students bought a bouquet for me that was bigger than my body. there are pictures of what i like to call "the purple monster" on the shutterfly site. my parents sent a package with clothes, coffee, and swedish fish. swedish fish rock my socks.

-zack made french toast with raspberry syrup, eggs, and bacon for me for my birthday. he also bought me a pair of hideous shoes that i'd been wanting. i'm so pumped about them!

-my mom and dad bought plane tickets for china! they are coming to visit from october 9th through the 19th. i can't express how completely excited i am!!! i miss them intensely.

-zack did a "tequila suicide" with conor at the bar. this is the most hilarious shot i've ever witnessed. you get a shot of tequila, the salt, and the lemon (it should be a lime, but china doesn't have many of them. conor says that they drink tequila with lemon in england... that's just wrong to me) like a normal shot of tequila. but... you put the salt on your hand and SNORT IT UP YOUR NOSE then take shot of tequila and then SHOVE THE LEMON IN YOUR EYE. i couldn't handle watching conor and zack do this. it was so hilarious.

-one of my students told me that listening to me speak is like listening to music and she can't help but dance. (she's 7)

-my little little kids' class has dwindled down to 2 students, candy and cissy. they're 3 and 4 respectively. cissy is wonderful. her mother speaks fluent english and they practice together. also, she has an amazing personality! and she calls me snow white. she made her mother a translator for us once so that cissy could ask me if i was snow white before i was a teacher. how adorable is that? candy doesn't speak. she doesn't speak chinese or english. so, in a class of 2 kids with 2 teachers, only having 1 student participate is frustrating. she won't color either. it's ridiculous. she DOES shove her fingers up her nose to incredible heights. emily read a poem to me last night by shel silverstein about nose picking and how one shouldn't put one's fingers up one's nose because they will be bitten off by a snail that resides in the sinuses. i want to have it translated for her.

-there is a new curriculum for the little kids' classes. instead of being "playway" it's now "small stars." small stars takes a reasonably sane early education teacher and turns him/her into a psycho by means of puppet use. with small stars, its' all about puppets. the teacher is to use at least one puppet at all times. the teacher talks to the puppet, and the puppet talks to the students. the teacher may not reprimand the students, the puppet must reprimand the students. after the first class i closed the door to the classroom after all the kid left, stared at the puppet named "mel" on my hand and said out loud "shit, i am mr. garrison."

-zack and i joined a gym! it's upstairs from our school, so it's very convenient and it makes it difficult to come up with excuses for not going. i was crampy this week, so i didn't go. zack went 4 times this week and he's feeling great. i'm looking forward to sweating my innards out, getting my butt in gear, and feeling better about myself.

-i started playing zelda II for the snes again. apparently i hate myself.

-there's a gorgeous park in our town. it's a mixture of pagodas, green paths, lakes, river-side paths, and lots of lotus plants. right now it's full of locusts and their sounds makes my heart explode. there are lots of to-be-wed couples having their wedding photos taken. it's generally a quiet, peaceful, beautiful place to walk with someone. zack and i went there yesterday for a picnic. he made salads with sautéed asparagus. yum. we sat in a pagoda and enjoyed our greens while watching a little boy trying fish in a lake with a line and hook. the heat got the best of us and we left after about an hour, but we enjoyed our short stay.

-we discovered a huge market close to our apartment. we can buy fruit and veggies there for a fraction of the cost we pay at the grocery store. it's hilarious that i feel like i'm paying too much for my veggies at the supermarket because they're dirt cheap to begin with. but, at the street market, we can buy higher quality produce. there's also a wet market with all kids of creepy live(ish) fish. next to that there is a fowl market (and boy is it ever foul... knee-slapping, i know) where one can purchase live chickens, ducks, etc. i didn't have the stomach to explore that one. i don't know if we'll go back to the fruit market, they kind of ripped zack off. but the veggie market it awesome.

-i have come to the conclusion that zack and i are going to be even bigger tight-wads when we come back to the states. i mean, we're both fairly frugal people and we try to get the most out we get angry when we have to pay more than 30 rmb for a shirt ($4.50 usd). we're going to be in trouble when we have to pay for goods/services at home.

-i'm tossing around the idea of getting my master's degree in education. perhaps i can start it online while i'm here and finish when we come back to the states for good. i'd like to continue working in education, but i would need the certification to do so. since i don't really feel like going back to school for a 4-year teaching degree, i'm trying to figure out a away to do it in 2 years. does anyone out there have any ideas or suggestions?

-that's all i have running through my mind at the moment. as always, thanks for reading!

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07 July 2009 @ 07:58 pm

(no subject)

so, last week we moved. everything at the apartment has been coming together nicely. things get lost during moves (i guess) and we lost a couple of important things... namely, my wallet and our cell phone. blah. it bummed me out for a whole week.

in other news...

summer camp began on monday and it's going pretty well so far. i have a total of 10 students between 2 classes, so that's a bit discouraging, but we're all doing ok. somehow, i ended up with the my least-favorite age group: 11-14 year olds. i expressed to my higher-ups my desire to be with the pre-schoolers (something which delighted the rest of my co-workers, as they hold the antiquated mind-set of 'children should be seen and not heard'), but our schedules are all swapped. it works to my advantage because my schedule is now similar to zack's, but we're both here from 12-9, so our off hours aren't very precious to use anyway. eh.

the marketing guy, martin, has been taking us out to alley-bars. it's been highly amusing for all involved. the first night, he took zack out with the other marketing guy, wade. i was still in class, so martin sent wade to pick me up and bring me to the place. i was imagining when zack explained "wade is coming to pick you up," that he meant via car or taxi or something other than his scooter. yes. so, i stepped out of my class and was pushed out the school doors and onto the back of a scooter with a tiny man. i think i scared him, because i gripped onto his shoulders a bit more tightly every time we hit a pot-hole/man-hole cover/tumbleweed of trash/etc. btw: wade doesn't speak any english, and i didn't figure this out until we'd arrived and martin explained. whew, i thought that the guy just didn't like me. i mean, i usually don't make assumptions about people regarding what languages they can/can't speak... but he works at an english school...

so at this restaurant (picture a 7-11 turned into a kitchen with bamboo chairs and broken tables in the parking lot on street with hot dog vendors and other 7-11's turned into eateries), i ate amazing food. we had snails, crawfish (which martin kept calling 'crazy-fish', (insert spirit-fingers motion)), and edamame which were all so so delectable. i struggled pretty hard with eating all of them. hey, you try eating a crawfish with chopsticks! i had already eaten my dinner, but martin insisted that i order something else. i tried to decline, but he really wouldn't let me. so, he ordered wade to take me to the kitchen and chose my supper. wow. just imagine an alley full of colorful basins of various sizes (some the size of kiddie pools for backyard wading). k, imagine in those basins all kinds of fish. i was so amazed by the sight, that i was distracted and just pointed and said "that one" in chinese. then, a medium-sized fish swimming in oil and veg came to my table. it was very tasty, and i enjoyed it until IT happened. by IT, i mean the event of a pin bone lodging itself into my left tonsil. at first, i felt a stabbing in the ol' throat. i kinda coughed and took a couple swigs of beer. nothing. i even started digging around with my whole hand down my throat... luckily chinese manners forgave me as performing this act at the table wouldn't really have a "yuck" factor. still, nothing. it was hopeless. we didn't go home for another 2 hours. eesh.

when we got home, zack got himself equipped with the tweezers and went to work. he pulled a 1.5 inch bone from the skin in my throat. my ear bothered me for a couple days afterward. but i'm ok now. i think it's a good story, sorry if you don't think so.

the 4th was severely uneventful, but my 70-year old ef 3 student approached me and wished me a "happy independency day," which was good enough for me. to celebrate, i made potato salad for my class and did some trivia about the u.s. i forgot to bring forks, so we ate with chop sticks, and i was tickled. my students raved over the potato salad and they've decided that american cuisine is far superior to that of the chinese. mwahahahahaa!!!! >ahem<

only 15 minutes left in my "work day." my course load has been pretty light for right now, while poor zack is working constantly. he asked to have all of the VIP classes... crazy guy. friday is our day off, and we're looking forward to it. i think we'll wander over to the "plants and animals" market and buy some seeds and dirt and stuff. it's time that we "relax with a hobby," as the hobby store in millvale likes to remind us. :)

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18 June 2009 @ 11:28 am

ch- ch- ch- changes...

first things first. if you follow zack's lj, sorry for the repeat. zack and i will be moving to jinhua on the 28th to teach at the new school there. the way this opportunity came to us was a bit strange, but we're happy to take it. we had asked cornel a while ago about moving because he expressed his problem of needing more foreign teachers there. zack and i felt that a change would be a good thing for us, so we volunteered to go. he came back to us and said that kim would be going... and she loves yiwu and has a boyfriend-type thing going on here. but, nonetheless, kim moved. on week later, she goes cyring to cornel to let her come back to yiwu because she misses her students and blah blah. i was really confused why she left in the first place when zack and i had offered to go. oh well. so kim wants to move back and cornel comes to us again. "of course we'll go," we told him.

so, yesterday, we went to jinhua with cornel to check out kim's apartment. gosh, is it small. but! it has a kitchen!!!!! like, a separate room with a gas stove, counters, and a real sink with hot water to wash dishes!!!! and there is a nice little window in the kitchen. there is a balcony that looks over the field of a middle school and the balcony doesn't have bars covering it... it's open. the bedroom has a faux wooden floor and the living room is small, white and clean. the "washroom" is very small... but it's clean and there aren't bricks hanging out of the walls or cement splattered all over the place. what i'm getting at is that it is a much much nicer place than our apartment in yiwu. i mean, it's unusually big for a chinese apartment... but it's so grimey. the walls haven't been painted, so they are impossible to clean. and they are in desparate need of a scrubbing because of how the last tenants felt it appropriate to smash mosquitos all over them. so, the walls are covered with black handprints and splatters of blood along with tape and hot pink marker. yeah. there are wires and weird faucets sticking out from everywhere. the filth... i just can't explain it. like zack said, it's hard to keep up on housework because it's hard to get the motivation to clean something that will always remain dirty-looking. i'll make sure to take some detailed pictures of both apartments for comparison-sake.

aside from the upgraded apartment (even though it's less than half the size of our current one) other benefits of the move include working at a newer, slightly less corrupt school, living in a cleaner city, being around people who don't take dumps in the street, and being close to a university (which means there will be a lot of folks around our age to hang out with). there's a gym upstairs from the school, and i'm thinking about joining. also, our apartment is a 2 minute walk from the school. that beats the hell out of the half and hour walk we do now. i mean, it's not that i'm lazy, it just stinks walking in the heat in dress clothes, then having to teach all day, then sweat all the way back home again. and forget running home really quick to have a nap/take a shower to make youreslf feel human again. the heat is getting pretty serious around here. anyway...it's a much quieter city than yiwu. which is weird. jinhua is over twice the size of yiwu. it's not a trade city like yiwu, so people so other things than buy and sell in bulk and haggle. some variety is nice. we have also been informed that the middle school kids have morning anouncements and exercises at 6:30 am every day, so that may take some getting used to... but school is almost over.

so that's what's going on in terms of big news for us. onto something else...

on tuesday, a group of the local teachers, anne, and i went to one of the teacher's (her name is demy) hometown to pick waxberries. mr. king took us via the ef mobile to lanxi, about 1.5 hours away. when we arrived, demy showed us to the house in which she grew up. she told me that she was very ashamed of her town because it is so poor. i understood what she meant, but i told her not to be ashamed. we were greeted by her mother, brother, sister-in-law, and 9 month old neice. they had prepared a feast for us. it was the best meal i've had yet. we all crowded around a tall wooden table on benches made out of 3 2x4s in a dark room with dirt floors and ate a meal fit for royalty. in the country, people drink out of bowls, not cups... and i was amused by this as i sipped beer and sprite from a porcelain bowl, in which i found bits of chicken that i had dropped in it on the way to my eating bowl. i was a beautiful lunch. then, we all grabbed a basket and followed demy to her family's waxberry orchard/field/mountain. we hiked for a little while through the forest, and then it was up and up and up! we scaled a hill so steep to get to the waxberry trees, and it was hilarious. we were all sliding down the hillside, screaming like little girls. when we made it to the top, we were in awe of our surroundings. poking my head above the tree line, i could see a huge green valley surrounded by black mountains. it was a breath-taking view. then, it was time to get to work. demy said we couldn't return to her home until we had each filled our baskets. eesh. then, i got confused. are we taking these home with us or are we giving them to your family? whatever, i was gladd to be hanging off the side of a mountain, climbing trees and eating as many waxberries as i wanted. i love these things, man. they taste a little bit like a pomegranate and a strawberry to me. they are so awesome!

so we picked and climbed and ate and sweat and sweat and sweat. it was a hot one. the pictures from the trip crack me up. all of the local teachers are so little and cute and smiling, and i'm the big oafey one who is drecnhed in sweat and looking like i'm dying. i was fine, it was just a bit warm. when we had all filled our baskets, we skidded down the mountain and headed back to demy's house. there, we were greeted with drinks and about 20 pounds of frozen waxberries. beautiful. taking our basket of berries with us only cost 30 yuan each. in the markets in yiwu, it costs 15 for 0.5 kilos of waxberries, and we each left with about 4 kilos. we got a pretty sweet deal.

we hiked up another hill and hung out at the town's resevoir for a bit. it was such a peaceful day for me. i think i needed it.

then, we headed back to yiwu. i showered profusely and then zack left to teach my classes, as we have swapped days this week. anne came over and we watched that benjamin button movie. i thought it was a great idea that fell into an idiot's hands. it was long, inconsistent, and frustrating, but i was still entertained. anne kept having to ask me to translate the southern drawl for her. every once in a while she would lean over and ask things like "what's a creole?" and "did he say 'wake' or 'work'?" it amused me.

i'll post the photos soon. i've been at the computer for too long and my eyeballs are starting to sweat with the rest of me. damn this humidity!!!

we've been here for about 3.5 months already. it's enough time to get into a groove, but not enough time to get attached. so, we think it's good time to go. we'll miss the couple friends that we've made, but we won't be far away. it's only an hour drive between the cities.

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09 June 2009 @ 03:10 pm

no news is good news, i guess?

hello, all. it's been a while since my last post because there hasn't been a whole lot to report. zack was fairly ill through the weekend, and i was busy teaching his classes. he's doing better now, so that's a relief.

a lot of changes have been happening around us! cornel, our boss, is leaving our school to manage the new EF school in jinhua (yiwu's sister city). a couple other teachers will be leaving such as our bro, liviu, and lashana (whose wedding we attended). liviu got into some trouble at the school via not keeping his hands to himself around our female colleagues, so he's being fired. we're really sad to see him go because he has been a great friend/father figure to us... but the whole sexual harrassment bit kind of made me stop calling him "daddy liviu" (shudder). also, kim from america will be going with cornel. our western family is breaking apart, and this is narrowing our friendship options. we still have anne, though. and god love her! she just returned from her trip back to england and brought with her back to china for me gin and tampons!!! hooray!!!

cornel talked to us about a week ago about moving to jinhua. we were so excited to be given this opportunity and zack and i spent the night celebrating our future move. since the day we arrived, john (the principal) has been asking us to teach in jinhua... so we thought that this deal was in the bag. we are eager to move away from yiwu because it's a boring place. once we got over the initial amazement of everything being new (as you have when going to a different place) we found that there is nothing fun to do in this city. sure, there are some bars and a couple of really nice parks close to the school, but yiwu is what it is: a business and trade city. people come here to haggle for small commodities and then get the heck away. this city is very important to the zhejiang province and to all of china as a business center, but that is all that seems to offer. there is one movie theater (which i have yet to find), and that's about all the cultural entertainment that is offered. so, i guess you can say that i'm a bit frustrated/disappointed with my experience here right now. jinhua is a bigger, cleaner, more developed city. there is a big university there, so there are a lot more educated folk and hence (apparently) less people crapping on the sidewalk. there are also more cultural-type things to do. anyway, cornel came back to us this week and informed us that we will be staying in yiwu. a boo.

sorry to be such a debbie-downer! i've been feeling pretty blue as of late, and i think it may be due to the fact that i have too much down-time with not much to do to fill it. i've been trying to rememdy this by creating more work for myself. i have volunteered to do telephone teaching, which is something that only local teachers do. in order for me to do this successfully, i have to learn more chinese. so far, my teacher has been hattie (my co-teacher for playway). i have learned how to introduce myself, ask if the student is at home, and instruct the student to get their book and turn to a specific page. it doesn't sound like much, but it has required a lot of intense practice and drilling on my part. i had another language triumph yesterday, when i was too tired to walk home with groceries by myself. i decided to take a taxi home. usuallly when we do this, we hail a cab and hand a card to the driver that has our address written on it. yesterday, i didn't have the card, but andy had practiced the pronunciation of our address with us a few days ago. my heart pounding, i hailed the cab, said "hello, i'm going to xiu hu xi lu. you got it? yes or no?" and the cabbie took me pretty close to our street. i then asked him to go a little further, he understood and i arrived in one piece to our aparment. i was so excited!

also, i'm the the process of creating a debate club at the school. the students really enjoy competition, so i figured that this would be a great way for them to practice their speaking and have a little bit of fun. i'm so grateful to the teachers who have jumped on board with me to help organize everything. we're shooting for the debate to take place at the end of the month.

this past weekend, i helped with a kids' workshop that kim and demy (a local teacher) were running. their assigned topic was "do something with ice cream," and i suggested that they make ice cream with the kids. their brains exploded over the idea that this was possible. i typed up the instructions and wrote down the ingredients, but still they didn't get it. so andy and i ran around a bunch and found the ingredients. i had no idea that finding sealable plastic bags would prove to be so difficult! but we got all of the supplies and it was a success. the kids were so proud of their accomplishment! there was banana, mango, coookie ice cream for the 24 students. hooray!

in the rest of my spare time i've been amusing myself by doing wedding planning. yes, that's right! absolutely nothing has been set in stone, but ideas are being tossed aorund. our tentative date is late march/early april 2011. during this time, we will be between contracts. the plan is to come home for about a month, get married, have a ton of visiting and fun-having, then go back to roaming the globe offering our teaching services. the original plan when we were initially engaged was to travel and teach for 3-4 years, and then come home, get married, and settle. while we walked around west lake in hangzhou, we came up with the idea that we don't want to wait that long, and that it would be so much fun to come home for a little while and have a great wedding/visiting celebration then keep on doing what we're doing. i mean, it would make it that much more special to get all of our friends and family together and party after not seeing everyone for so long. we hope that you all feel the same!

but don't worry, we're planning on coming home once before our wedding. zack needs to get a new passport, as his current one will expire next september. we're planning to come home in march 2010. it seems far away, but we're been here for over 3 months already! only 9 more to go...

what else...? summer is quickly approaching, and that means that our lives will become very chaotic. we will be working 6 days a week and have classes pretty much all day and evening. i'm looking forward to this so that i can get a better feel for my job. i haven't gotten my footing yet, and this leads to me beating myself up pretty badly. i'm hoping that being able to be with my classes from the beginning of the term will allow me to feel more connected to my students and be able to establish a more sound structure for my courses. perhaps being thrown in as a substitute for all of my classes wasn't an ideal situation for me as a new teacher... but i have learned a lot from my mistakes.

i'm going to try to make a little video featuring our school and colleagues this week. and next weekend, our students will make presentations for their parents, and you betcha that i'll be filming my classes!

that's all for now! thanks for reading. zaijian!

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17 May 2009 @ 11:17 am

i've been writing this bit by bit for over a week, it's time. things have been crazy, read on...

well, hello there, livejournal followers of mine! it's been a while since my last post, and i apologize. i'd like to tell you that i haven't written because i've been too busy to do so, but rather, i've been too much of a lazy bum to do so. well, today i've kicked myself into some sort of gear.

ok. let's start with the may holiday (labor day). a big group of folks from the school got together and went on a picnic at a natural reserve. it was a busy day for the park, and there was a ton of traffic on these narrow dirt rows lending themselves to two lanes of traffic. mr. king grew impatient waiting for the cars to move, so we parked in the middle of the road. "but mr. king, our plan was to bbq on the beach! we're halfway up a mountain right now" we said. and mr. king smiled his usual smile and said his signature line (in chinese) "i don't care." ok. we all hiked down the hill in the woods and positioned ourselves into a conveyor belt system, and we passed all of our equiptment and food down the line to the beach. it was hilarious. doris, who was next to me, was very worried and upset about the process. i told her "um, it's teambuilding? we'd been wanting to do something like this anyway, right?" she got really into that idea, and it kept her from dropping everything i handed to her. there are some pictures of it on the photogoods site. so, we got to the beach with all of our stuff and got ready to do some grilling. oh, but wait. we can't actually relax or have fun in china. everything is a competition. we were divided into 3 groups, each team got a grille and their foodstuffs and we had to race to see who could start their fire first, have the first piece of food cooked...etc. luckily, i grabbed up zack along with cornel, danny, and a couple of my local teachers that i'm friends with and zack did his thing and took over the cooking bit. and the rest of us laid back and drank warm beer. we insisted on helping him, but he wouldn't let anyone touch his grille. it was very reminiscent of the days at houlihan's. we had a realy nice time eating and chatting for like 4 hours. there was so much food!

i really don't understand how the women here do it. i mean, they eat 4 times a day and when they eat, they really eat. all of those tiny women can eat both me and zack way under the table. and they stay super thin. they don't exercise either aside from walking in the park for 30 minutes a day. oh, and they walk backwards, as this is supposed to help you lose weight and sleep well. what. but seriously, the women are always telling me about these weird voodoo tricks on how to stay healthy, but it's so hard for me to accept any of it because it all sounds so nonsensical. like the way they all drink hot water instead of cold or room-temperature water because it's good for you. if you drink cold beverages, you'll catch a cold, they say. and if you get a fever, you go to an "acupuncturist' and they pinch your collar bones until you are seriously bruised. if you have a sore throat, they do the same: they pinch your throat in a grid with about 20 points. my friend, jennifer, had the throat thing, and it didn't help her... she was sick for 2 weeks. but when she got better, she siad it was because of the pinching. come on! most chinese people wear glasses or should be wearing glasses. lashana (the pregnant one) had a nose bleed last week. i walked doris' office and they were both sitting there staring at eachother, and lashana had a tissue shoved up her nose. "um...what are you two doing?" i asked. they explained to me that lashana gave herself a nosebleed because she was so excited about her wedding coming up the following week, and to make it go away they had to be quiet and she needed to calm herself. give me a break. i wanted to tell her that, along with her other allergy symptoms, that getting nosebleeds is normal. it has nothing to do with your "excitement." and, i also wanted to show her how to actually stop a nose bleed... but, our explanations to one another are just useless. i don't get chinese medicine. most people here will defend its superiority over western medicine to the death. i'm a firm believer in pills. i don't want people pinching me or putting hot, glass suction cups on my back to draw out the poisons in my chi. i don't buy it. acupuncture, however, i do believe in. it makes sense... you target ceratin nerves, and get rid of the pain. bang, it makes sense. all of this bo-jang-a about getting rid of "bad blood" or "chi poison," really, come on. andy told us about a proceedure that involves removing skin from the back and taking ox horn shaving and rubbing them into the raw skin. this is supposed to remove the "bad blood." we explained to him how the whole bad blood thing had a popular stint in america, but kind of faded out after the practice of "blood letting" killed one of our presidents. his explanation was that we were just doing it wrong, and that it really works. it seems that, every day, we are reminded that china is living in a different century from america. they base their whole practice of medicine on good/bad energy and good/bad blood. no wonder there is no concern of sanitation or disease prevention. these are things that i want to better understand, but, for now, i can't help but harbor a feeling of "what are you crazy people doing?"

anyway, back to labor day. we hung out for a while and ate and ate and wathed mr. king throw watermelons into the lake that had washed up on the shore. (if you're looking for an explanation, sorry, i haven't any.) after the profuse eating and sunning of my very pale skin, we headed back to the cars. we hiked up, and stood by the road for about an hour while we waited for traffic to move. we had fun though, as all the kids in the cars were leaning out to shake our hands and say "hello." then, we went to dinner. yes, after we'd eaten for 4 hours, it was, of course, time to eat. again. and, as usual, the food came and came. and we were urged to "eat!," eat more!" ugh. with our bellies way too full and our bodies too exposed to the sun, we headed to hell, aka: KTV.

alright. let me (begrudgingly) discuss KTV. it's karaoke, but on a micro scale. you go to a little room that is furnished with couches and a coffee table and also a karaoke machine/screen set up. it was a very nice facility. you're probably thinking that this doesn't sound that bad. well, you're wrong. so, we all sat in the dark with all of these crazy strobes going and the music was soooo loud. don't get me wrong, when i was in the states, i used to frequent karaoke nights at bars and i would really enjoy myself. looking back on those nights brings me a lot of fond memories of casually hanging out with my friends, meeting new people, being able to hear the people next to me talking, and having fun listening to other people sing while anticipating my turn. this KTV had it all wrong. it was so loud that we couldn't talk to eachother at all, and there were no breaks with the music to relax a little bit. and the same 3 people out of about 15 kept singing... and they were all slow cheesey songs. the room also contains various percussion instruments like a tambourine and maracas, so we al had to take turns trying to stay with the beat. it's all just so weird. and of course, they were competing. it's just so sad to me that some think that this is fun. i was feeling bad about it, because i wanted to have a good time, but then, as i was looking around the room at the other foreign teachers, i realized that they weren't having fun either... but we were all doing a pretty good job of acting. they didn;t have too many english songs, so i ended up singing whitney houstin's "i will always love you" and i dedicated it to -edd. i miss you bro.

then, zack got a migrane... and the party for us was over. poor guy! so, cornel took us home and we collapsed on eachother.

another notable event that took place this month was going to lashana's wedding. it was crazy. when we arrived at the wedding building, there were two couple standing out front under arbors of flowers and feathers. and in front of them were two brass bands, each playing a different version of the wedding march. i found this to be quite silly. as the couple greeted us, we gave to them our red envelope (the money holder... no cards here, just the cash...), and the men are given a mini pack of cigarettes. so, zack got cigarettes, and i got a hug from the bride. i was happy with my welcome gift. then, it all happened so quickly. quickly and with bubble machines, and a little man in a red shirt who screamed into a microphone. they cram a whole wedding ceremony into a 5 minute routine. this includes speeches of thanks toward the bride's and groom's parents, vowels, the exchange of rings, the kiss, the cutting of cake, the pouring of champagne, and the "i present to you you for the first time..." whoa. then we ate for about a half an hour. then the singing started. lashana asked zack and me to sing something...ugh. but how can you say no to a bride-to-be? so, we sang "unforgettable" in the nat and natalie style. it went pretty well save for zack forgetting how the song went. haha. then, zack and andy did a rap together, and i almost died of laughter. then, lashana emerged from an adjacent room wearing a red dress, as the brides wear a white one for the ceremony (because they like this part of western weddings i guess). and, as i may have mentioned before, lashana is pregnant. this is the biggest of no-no's here. i've recently learned that having a child out of wedlock is illegal. not merely frowned upon, but ILLEGAL. the government will not issue an i.d. card to a newborn whose parents are not married. to obtain this card in this situation, one must pay a minimum of 10,000 rmb to the government (which is about a year's worth of wages for the average chinese worker in our town). also, abortion is illegal. it was popular during the times when the "one child policy" was being strictly enforced (and people still live by it to this day, but i can't get a clear answer on whether or not it's still a law). so, the choices for what to do if you get pregnant are pretty narrow. i'm not sure what lashana's specific situation is, but at least her child will be legal. yikes. back to the wedding... we ate for a bit, and kind of "waited" for something to happen, i guess that's what you'd call it. all of the relatives were filing out, but we, at the foreign table, were awaiting something. something like cake, or dancing... nope. i mean, it was bad enough that there wasn't a cookie table! i miss pittsburgh. for wedding favors, they put a bottle of expensive bie jiu (strooooong chinese liquor... i equate it to moonshine. and it's usually over 100 proof) on the table, and more very expensive cigarettes are passed out. this country has a serious smoking problem. eesh. so, that was it! the whole thing lasted about 2 hours. and we were the last ones there. hm.

there will be more to come. right now i'm getting over some really bad food poisoning. i've been sick for the past 3 days and today i finally went to the hospital. i wept silently through the whole thing. the doctor screamed at me and told me i was faking, then he took my temperature and it was 101, and i was shivering. so he knew i was actually sick. then he starts telling me that the problem isn'y my stomach, that it's my throat because it looks raw. well, no kidding, i've been throwing up for 2 days. and then the next thing i know, there;s this lady standing over me asking me all kinds of questions about why i'm in china, how long i've been here, where else i have been...etc. then the whole room (yes, same as before with all of the other patients hanging over me) starts freaking out. they think i have swine flu. oh god. and then, the doctor keeps on asking me if i "ate some bad food." how the heck would i know? if i knew it was bad... i probably wouldn't have eaten it. then he accused me of drinking too many cold beverages. i'm so tired of this idiotic way of practicing medicine. all i wanted was some antibiotics and an i.v. of fluids so that i wouldn't die from dehydration. anyway, i got a shot of something injected into my bum (i thought they only did that with babies in movies) and then i had two courses of i.v. stuff. i have no idea what was given to me. i asked to lay down while i had my treatment, and i had to pay extra to lay in a bed. i didn't care. i actually got some sleep for the first time in 2 days. then, then sent me home with more pills... levofloxacin lactate. these are antibiotics with side effects including vomitting, diarrhea, dizziness, and stomach cramping. great. now i'm back to where i started. ugh. good news is, i'm feeling better than yesterday... let's hope tonight goes well, i can't bear to spend another night in a cold sweat, writhing in pain.

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30 April 2009 @ 04:35 am

a week in the chinaworld.

last week went pretty well teaching-wise. i had the last of my "open door" classes where the parents can observe their children's classes. i had a lot of parents come to the younger ones' classes, but none for my teenagers.

last weekend, something kind of weird happened when we were grocery shopping. we were in the produce section and we heard "sally! zack-a!" being yelled from across the store. i guess "sally" was her best attempt at "sarah," or maybe she didn't catch my name from when she was in my open-door class. then snoopy's mom came running toward us. she doesn't speak much english, so she said "snoopy's mom! hahahahahahhaaaaaaahaaaaaaahaaaaaahahahahahahaaa!" the nervous laughter went on and on and on. it was so awkward. i explained that we were buying ingredients for our supper. she was really upset by this because it was about 8:30 pm. "no dinner! oh no!" then she grabbed the food out of our hands and put it in her cart. she pointed to the watermelon. "you like?" she asked. "oh no, no, that's ok" we said. then she pointed to the apples and repeated "you like?" and we said that we already had some at home. then she moved onto the mangoes. this woman wouldn't give up, so i said "yes, they are very good." she yelled for snoopy to get a bag, and she proceeded to fill it with a thousand mangoes. we told her that she didn't have to do that, to which she forcefully, but happily replied "nevermind! nevermind!" she whisked us to the check-out, where she and her husband gave us some of their groceries and then paid for them for us. i couldn't believe it. i had met this woman once before, and now she was buying our groceries. crazy. we felt so weirded out. i understand that this was just a nice gesture, but it was a bit unconventional to us. i decided to show my appreciation for her generosity by giving her a hug... in public... in front of everyone. she kind of freaked out. i think that, since we are expected to follow their cultural norms, that i should be allowed to practice a couple of my own. i think that it's reasonable to show my thanks for something in the way that i see fit. anyway, it was pretty hilarious to see her wriggle away from my embrace. this was followed by more "neverminds."

then we came home and shared some beers with liviu, cornel, and liviu's friend rechel from ireland. she's originally from the philippines, but now she lives in ireland, where she is a nurse. she told us that she gets 6 weeks of paid vacation a year. what?!?! they have a standard 4 weeks of national holiday vacation in ireland. this is crazy. she assumed that americans get even more than this. she was really upset to find out that there are a handful of bank holidays and people normally get 1-2 weeks of paid vacation after a certain period of time. so, she was spending one of her weeks traveling around asia and visiting her hometown. she is a lovely woman, and i'm sorry i didn't get to spend more time with her. she brought a bag of home-made cranberry oat granola for liviu, but she gave it to me instead. i am forever grateful for this. i ate it in a span of 3 days, and i teared up everytime i took a bite. i miss granola. :( she also brought a bottle of hennessy for us to enjoy. i am also very grateful for this.

we went out to dinner to welcome rechel last week. cornel came with us and ordered for the table. he got a call from the school, and had to leave early. so... all the foreigners were left there. i grabbed a book and figured out how to ask for the check and then i squared up with the waitress. whew. i felt very accomplished.

now to the important part of the week! on monday morning, zack and i went to hangzhou via taxi, then train, then taxi. we totally did it. i had studied all weekend how to get tickets at the station, how to negotiate taxi fares, and how to get a room at a hotel. first of all, the train ride there was awesome! the train we were on was brand new with beautiful seats and air-conditioning. and it was clean! it went at a steady 100 km/hour and we arrived in about an hour and a half. when we got there, we found a "taxi" (it was a guy with a van) to take us to the hotel that we happened to have a business card for. he started at 50, but i got him down to 40 (only to find out the next day that it shouldn't have been more than 15... oh well). he got lost and dropped us off in the vicinity of the hotel. we wandered around for a while, but couldn't find it. we were too distracted by the overwhelming beauty of the "west lake."

hangzhou is regarded to be the most beautiful place to visit in china... and i understand why. the lake is amazing. there are beautiful mountains, gardens, old architecture, and clean streets with nice restaurants. i found the china that i was looking for. and we had perfect weather! not to hot or cool, sunny, with just enough of a breeze. on the first day, we walked around and looked for a hotel. there is a hyatt right by the lake, and we went in the check out the room prices. eesh. their cheapest room was 1900 a night... almost $300. mind you, zack and i earn above-average salaries: 5500 each per month. to spend 1900 for a hotel room, you have to be one wealthy person. after checking out a couple other hotels, a strange fellow sauntered over to us and starting showing his brochures to us. we decided to follow him and we found a hotel room at the reasonable price of 200 for a night. the room was a bit smaller than my bedroom at my parents' house, but it was clean and it had an enclosed shower... we were sold. we went through a long process of figuring out what the heck we were saying to eachother (between zack and myself and the hotel staff) and we finally figured out that they wanted us to give them 400 (200 for a deposit that we would get back the next day). i felt kind of weird about this, but i didn't know what else to do. i worked out ok.

then, we walked to the west lake. be sure to check out the pictures, i'll be posting them on the photo site tonight. we walked around for a while, then became violently hungry. we decided to splurge and eat a really pricey lunch at a "c. straits cafe." we had a multi-course meal that included an appetizer, soup with puff pastry, salad, bread and butter, i had thai ribs, a fruit platter, and dessert. there's a picture of zack with his cute little dessert spoon and tiny tea cup. hehe. he looks like a giant.

then we set out to walk the entirety of the lake. we walked for about 4 hours and it was absolutely wonderful. it's 60 square kilometers, so i guess you could say we did a bit of walking. during the day, there was a "water show" ala belaggio style. it was cute. along the way, we saw a couple kissing... gasp! the weird thing about it was that they locked lips for a solid 10 minutes without moving. zack and i came to the conclusion that the chinese are really against public displays of affection because it is a sight that is too awkward to behold. at night, thre must have been a wedding or something... there was loud music and all different colors of light coming from a courtyard and it lit up the entire lake. we were awe-struck.

it was great to have some time with my best friend, just walking around and talking. i felt at peace for the first time in a while. we stopped at one of the 3 starbucks on the lake and leisurely sipped coffee and admired the setting sun. ahhhhh....

we got back to the hotel pretty late, had some beers, and went to sleep on a very hard mattress. we were pleasantly suprised that we went the whole night without being disturbed by knocking from the "night women," asking us if we wanted "massagees." this happens a lot to foreigners. the room was fully equipt with condoms, lube, extra changes of underwear for men and women... so i mean, they're expecting you to do something. luckily, we weren't bothered by anyone wanting to utilize the offerings of the room...

the next day, we got our deposit back from the hotel, as promised. so that was a relief. then, we set out to visit the 2 temples by the lake. there was one that was a compound right next to the lake. there was a lot to photograph there. then we hiked to the next temple, which is a tower. we took some nice photos there, too. we had a nice hike through the woods as we made our way down from the tower. at the bottom, there was a pond that was full of turtles. i was tickled to see so many of them all sunning themselves on this weird, ancient rock sculpture. this was about the time that i freaked out. the whole time we had been in hangzhou, people had been sneakily taking photos of us. twice, i was sitting on a bench and a chinese guy would sit on the bench beside me, pretending to pose for a photo by himself... but the photographer was actually taking a photo of me. what creeps. i don't have a problem with people taking pictures of me... but they should ask. it's so rude. i mean, why do they want a picture of some foreign chick? why wouldn't they just ask me if i would stand in a photo with them? it was really getting to me. so i started going out of my way to let the shady-photographers know that what they were doing wasn't ok. i would wait until they had their shot lined up and then just turn around, then make eye contact with them, conveying the general message of "what gives, man?" not the biggest deal in the world, but after it had happened about 50 times, i was fed up. this was the only negative element of the trip, and i can live with that!

walking back from the tower, we saw a girl wearing a leopard-print t-shirt with a big pink rectangle on it that said "peptide". i think that this is the best shirt we've seen so far. the spelling errors and the chinglish make for some pretty hilarious messages, but this one took the cake.

we ate lunch at a gorgeous little cafe in the middle of a wooded area. it had glass walls and ceilings. it adverstised itself as being "probably the best chinese cuisine." modest, yet confident. and i agreed. it was probably the best food i had eaten in china. it wasn't swimming in oil and there weren't handfuls of bones to manuever around. there was a little feral cat outside the cafe, and i took its picture. i miss my kitties!!!! we pass 2 pet shops on the way to school everyday and they've had teeny little orange kittens for the past week. i want them so bad. ughghghgggghhh.

we ate dinner at a papa john's. i know, we keep on selling out... but we can't deny that we love american food. plus, we had to! in the states, i don't think that papa john restaurants exist. i mean, they're mostly delivery/carry out joints. and, having been a past employee of the papa, i had to check it out how they do it up in china. we had a "mexican ole" pizza, and it was amazing. i also had an "italian soda" that was granadilla flavored. granadillas were my favorite fruits to eat when i was in ecuador, and i was so excited to enjoy their flavor again! then it was time to say goodbye to the most beautiful place i've ever seen and head back to yiwu.

we got a taxi to the train station for only 13 rmb. bah! oh well, now we know for next time that we souldn't pay 40. we got our tickets, which were only 19 rmb each as opposed to the 43 they cost to get to hangzhou. i was thinking that we got "hard seat" tickets instead of the "soft seat" like the first time. that's how they call the "first" and "economy" classes here. to our suprise, we made it into the "no seat" class and spent our return trip in a corridor between two train cars. we were ok, though. we just fluffed up our duffle bag and sat on it against a wall. we brought our new chinese text book with us, so we spent the trip learning a couple of phrases, while the other cheeky passengers hovered over us, listening and watching. again, this whole lack of american manners thing is wearing on me pretty hard. i'm trying not to let it bother me, but at the same time i'm trying not to let go of my own values. it's a strange dance.

upon arriving in yiwu, we got a taxi very easily, and we just showed our address to the driver. we still have no idea how to say our address. in time, this will happen. for now, it's an accomplishemt if i can correctly pronounce "woman" and "milk" (niu and niu with different tones...) with the proper intonation. learning how to say our entire address, it's gonna be a challenge. but, we made it home safely. we were sad to be back in yiwu. it all looks so filthy compared to hangzhou. zack summed it up pretty well "hangzhou was like a vacation in china, away from china." i can't agree more.

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21 April 2009 @ 10:42 pm

not a whole lot going on over here...

sorry, not much to report. our classes went really well this week. zack is feeling the heat of having a full weekend of children's classes.

we also had "open house" classes all weekend so the parents could see what their kids are up to. zack had parents in almost all of his classes, and he got superior feedback from them. i had a couple of parents, and they seemed to be pleased as well. one of my students mom's said that my class is "very funny." so, i guess that's a good thing?

on sunday, zack had a "life club" workshop for the kids. the theme was focused on spring and planting. so, zack and lashana (a local teacher) taught some vocab about spring and had them plant seeds in paper cups. the seeds that lashana brought were so weird! they are branded with chinese characters on one side and english on the other. the one i grabbed says "ily." not sure what that's supposed to mean. cornell finally came through with a guitar for zack, as he's been asking him for one since the first week we got here. it's a piece of junk, but it works most of the time, and it's bright green... so we're happy. zack played the guitar and we all sang a song about spring planting. it was adorable. i made up a little dance to go with it, and theyu got really into it. there are a couple pictures of us and the kids. the girl on the left is snoopy, and she's one of my best students. she is very bright. oh, and zack invented a new "springtime animal," the "spring dolphin." the spring dolphin sprays flowers out of its blowhole, and the children were fascinated to learn about this mysterious creature. :)

for one of my classes this weekend, i had to teach the modals must and mustn't. come on. who actually says "mustn't"??? i don't think it would be that big of a crime to skip over it for now and do "should," which is much more common. whatev. anyway, i thought it would be a good idea to make a poster of a very disheveled man and call him "mr. bungle." i had the kids say what he must and mustn't do to improve his situation, and then stick little cut-outs on the poster to fix him. example: i made mr. bungle have really gross teeth, so i had the kids say "he must brush his teeth" and put a laminated cut out of a toothbrush and toothpaste in his hand. they had a lot of fun with it. somehow, i lost the piece for washing his face... kids are cheeky like that sometimes. oh well.

i also had the kids make posters of good and bad habits. they were hilarious. for bad habits, the kids got really creative: "you mustn't poo in the park, fly a kite near power lines, or drink and drive." pretty good for 10 year olds. i don't know if pooing in the park is considered to be a habit, so it makes me wonder if they fully get the concept of "habits." at least they got the jist. it wasn't my idea to do habits, it's part of the curriculum. again, oh well.

on monday (4-20), i had to forfeit my day off to cover liviu's classes, because he was out of town with his friend for a day and he had asked me to cover for him. i don't understand why he asked me, because i don't share any of his classes anymore, and he should have asked someone that he shares with to cover. that's just how it works. oh well. so, liviu ended up coming back to yiwu early and went out to dinner with zack while i taught his classes. nice. they ate at a restaurant close to the apartment and they apparantly ate the spiciest dish known to man. zack wasn't feeling so great after that, he blames the egg salad he'd had for lunch. i dunno. but the belly-ache lasted into tuesday. so, we just kind of bummed around for the whole day.

next week, we're hoping to go to hangzhou duting our days off. we're going to try to attempt this without any help. so, i've been practicing my chinese on how to tell a taxi driver that i want to go to the bus station and to please turn on the meter while we're at it, purchasing bus tickets, getting a hotel room, and ordering food. whew. i think we'll make it. we have dictionaries that have the written chinese characters, and we'll resort to pointing if needed.

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15 April 2009 @ 12:00 am

more on what we've been up to...

4-9-09 thursday: profound frustration continues

today was my second meeting with the ef8 and ef3 classes. i chased kim and liviu all week, begging them to help me with my lesson plans. to which they always replied, "just review." this would be all fine and dandy, except that i don't know what they've covered so far. i came in at the end of their course, and had a whole course worth of reviewing to do. kim didn't even give me the book for the class after i asked her to give it to me... i had to borrow it from another teacher. then, kim told me to find the test that they would be given on saturday and to prepare them for it. so, i went to cornel and had him print it.

when i went to the ef8 class, i started prepping them by doing exercises similar to the questions on the test... and the students said "what are you doing? we've all taken the test." now, i had just spent 4 hours preparing an hour and a half class.... for nothing. they were supposed to have their test on saturday. what the heck. so, at the break, i stormed into cornel's office and lost it a little bit. this kind of stuff keeps on happening to me, and it makes me feel like i've failed. it seems that everyone else can operate on this system of mediocrity, so why can't i?

zack says i worry too much, but this is my job and it is the reason why i'm in china. i take it very seriously and i want my students to progress and learn. the classes at ef are really expensive, and our students make a lot of sacrifices in order to attend. i feel that they deserve to have organized, professional, and (dare i say) educational classes! arg!

so, that class was humiliating and useless. then came ef3. oh boy. i reviewed all the different past and present tenses with them. the students looked at me like i had horns growing out of my head. i was going by the book. they told me that they don't like learning grammar and that i should do something else. excuse me? their test was in 2 days and they needed to know this stuff. the tricky thing about the way our classes go: if the students fail a level they only have to pay 500 yuan to repeat it, where as the course originally cost 5800 yuan. so, the students intentionally fail so they can get more schooling for a fraction of the cost. this is so prevalent that an average class starts with 12-16 people, by the last week there are onyl 3-4 left in the class. the others who were absent will most likely fail and get to repeat. cornel reminds us of this all the time, and i think we should already be working hard to get our students to progress... but this aspect makes it even more important for them to move up. it's not only a school, it's a business. i know it sounds obvious, but it's something about which i need to remind myself. anyway, i founf out yesterday that only 2 students out of the 10 passed. great.

4-10-09 friday: the day sarah ruined christmas

my day at school started with a long academic meeting followed by a long training about "course management proceedure." i was relieved to finally learn about the testing and when and how it happens. zack started his day at school with a vip. then i planned my lessons for the weekend and devoted the rest of my afternoon and evening to drawing flashcards for my class on sunday.

in the middle of that, i had an afternoon tea. i decided to talk about holy week and easter, because the students have had a lot of questions about it. so, i started with ash wednesday and followed through until easter. they were pretty confused, but at least they got some answers. then i talked about the commercial end of it. i taught them about the easter bunny and all that. my students were in shock. i thought about my sister when one of my students said "so, how do the americans get a bunny rabbit to carry a basket to all the houses?" oh. my. god. she was serious. i tried not to laugh, but i let out a small giggle. i calmly explained to her that the easter bunny isn't real, you know, like how santa claus isn't real, it's somthing we tell our kids. "what! santa claus isn't real?!?!" they shouted. ok, before you start scolding me i want you to know that THESE ARE ADULTS... THEY ARE 18-30 YEARS OLD!!!! and the majority of them thought that santa was real. so, i will forever be the american teacher that ruined christmas for a handful of chinese adults. eesh.

later on, i had my playway 1 class... ususally my favorite, but not so much today. my co-teacher, hattie, has the same level on tuesdays and prepares the lesson early in the week during my days off. so, i basically get caught up with her and go over what each of us will contribute to the lesson, etc. well, today, she didn't let me contribute. every time i went to play a game or sing a song, she snatched it up and did it herself. hm. it went on like this for the whole class. i was just hanging out there as an assistant. weird. i didn't say anything to her because her english isn't very good. i figure that if it happens next week, we'll talk about it. i mean, she is the main teacher of the class, and the only reason i'm in it is so that there's a foreign teacher present.

later, zack did a workshop on the different kinds of music he listens to. i think he scared a few of them, but he was mostly well-received.

then we went home and braced ourselves for the looonnnnggggg weekend.

4-11-09 saturday: flip-flop

my day went really well for a change. this is the day that i have the class of the 10-12 year olds who hate my guts. but today, they greeted me when i came into the classroom and were engaged and attentive. they let themselves have fun. it was beautiful. meanwhile, in the next classroom with andy... the kids were being monsters. he came into my class at the break almost in tears. he was so uspet with his class, and they usually are great for him. i guess the energy of our classes flip-flopped for the day. it really upset him, so he decided to scrap the rest of our lessons and watch a movie for the rest of the 2 academic hours. i was a bit let down, because i was feeling like i was on a roll. also, doesn't that send the wrong message to the kids? "you are misbehaving, here, watch a movie." i mean, the kids don;t want to be there, so letting them watch a movie instead of having their lessons may have been a horrible idea. but that's just my opinion.

while the kids were wathcing "brother bear" with chinese subtitles, i set out to make a worksheet for homework related to the film. andy was kind of shocked that i would insist on such a thing. ok, if they get to watch a movie, they have to do something with it. it involves drawing and a bit of writing, i'm not getting all crazy on them or anything. during the movie, the one student, fatima, decided that she was bored and wanted to teach andy how to speak french. this girl completely blows my mind. i've written about her before. i told her that she should be in the adult classes, as she is almost 14. she should be in ef4 at least. she begs me "not to press the issue" (her own words... it's scary) and that she likes it in the kids' classes. cornel says that they have tried to move her up before, but she refuses. i don't really understand why. i guess she's more comfortable being in a lower level and being the best student than going somewhere where she would have to try harder. still, i'm just completely amazed by a 13 year old who was teaching a chinese guy french, in english and chinese, when her native tongue is punjabi. blows my mind.

meanwhile, zack wasn't even half done with his insanely busy day. i only have 6 hours of teaching on saturdays, but he had about 10 today. his morning class with the kids went really well. the unit they are on in the book is about christmas, so zack taught theem about christmas on the day before easter. he wanted them to decorate a tree as an activity. they refused, for some reason, so zack asked them if they wanted to decorate HIM. of course they wanted to! i really wish that i would have been there to take a photo of that. oh well. zack was a busy bee all day and all night with vip's, classes, and workshops. i only had 1 workshop in the evening that i was covering for a local teacher, so it wasn't very well attended.

4-12-09 sunday: culture clash

whoa man, it was an emotional day. my morning classes went great. the kids in playway were doing a story about a "woolly hat," so i brought my hat that i knit for them to use as a prop. there are photos of them wearing it. aw...

the afternoon classes doing go as greatly. they started our well, but then the tiger problems started. he wasn't paying attention and he was talking back. charlie was making me insane because he wouldn't stop laying on the floor or reading his comic books. finally, i had had enough. i told charlie to sit in his seat or leave. he wouldn't move... so i moved him. i picked him up by his shirt and pants and said "snoopy, open the door." and i literally threw him out of my classroom. i asked him again, "in or out" and he nodded his head violently and said "in." i felt so bad doing this. but, it had gone on for 2 hours. i needed to try something different from asking him to cooperate. and then the drama unfolded. we were playing a game and it was tiger's turn to play for the boys. he said no because he wasn't feeling well, and i told him that he and i would do it together. then, lily... little sweet lily, stood up and screamed something at tiger as she pointed at him. tiger then threw himself to the ground and was sobbing. what? i couldn't get it out of either of them... what was going on? panicked, i ran into the hallway where i found sophie and asked her to help me sort things out. when i returned to the classroom, i found the students standing over tiger, laughing at him. i growled at them to sit down and be quiet. sophie asked him what was going on as i asked the students to take out their books and do an exercise. then SOPHIE STARTED LAUGHING. what. she said that they were all laughing because he's a big boy and big boys don't cry, and they especially don't let little girls make them cry. my blood was on fire. i told her to get out of my classroom. i was lost. i made all the students line up in front of tiger to hug him and apologize. i was sick.

then the hell class. no one hit me this week. and i only had to throw one student back into her seat. but, they did respond to the lesson and so what they were told. then i had them draw easter bunnies. whew.

after my classes, i went to the teachers' office to get some support regarding what happened with tiger. i told them the story, and they laughed. i couldn't take it. i mean, my brother andy laughed at this. i told him that he was cruel for feeling that laughing at a little boy's pain was an acceptable way to deal with the situation. he explained that this is the way they deal in china. the students needed to shame him, because his crying made him "lose face." the other students were just doing their duty to make sure he felt enough shame. what?!!?!? he said that i'm too sensitive and that i need to understand that i'm not in america anymore where they baby their children. i had to humble myself at this point and nod my head, then i bolted out of the school.

i had to come back at 4:30 for a lifeclub activity with lucky. it was cancelled AGAIN due to the lack of participants. lucky took out her frustration on andy, because he's apparently in charge of the lifeclubs. eesh.

while all of this was going down, my poor zack was judging the language competition at the middle school near our apartment. he did so for 8 hours and had 100 contestants to judge. poor guy. he said that, for the "talent" part, almost all the kids sang "do re mi" from the sound of music. i think that i would have stabbed my eyes out... he is much stronger than i.

then we stayed up to talk to my family before their easter dinner. i got to talk to james for a while. it was so nice to see everyone and i miss you all very much.

4-13-09 monday: nothing to report, really

we did a whole lot of nothing today. we watched "lost" and ate. we made potatoe salad... and it made me cry a little bit. yum!

liviu and his friend from thailand came up for a couple of drinks. they have decided that our next country will be thailand. from the stories she and liviu told me, i wouldn't mind one bit.

4-14-09 tuesday: sunny and warm

today was another beautiful, sunny, clear, and breezy day. since it's been on the windy side here, the air has become much more breatheable. and the visibility has improved a lot as well. so, we seized the nice day and took a walk to a bookstore about a quarter of a mile from the school. zack is looking for a particular book on learning chinese, so he decided to search for it there. there weren't any books on learning chinese. zack found this to be strange, but next time you're in a bookstore, check out how many books they have on how to learn english. you'll find a couple at barnes and noble... but the pickings are slim. i found a bunch of cool stuff in the kids' section. i found a richard scarry book translated into chinese, with some english vocabulary. and i found english books for kids. some of them were realy weird. they provided the written chinese, the pinyin, and the english word. usually, you don't see a lot of pinyin in books... so i don't really know the purpose. then we headed home to watch more "lost."

i made salad for lunch. it was awesome. unfortunately, the only dressing i could find was 1000 island, and i was basically pink, sweet mayo. and we all know how i feel about mayo... it's the devil's pudding.

we talked to momma zelazny for a bit and we've asked her to send some spices to us. there aren't very many spices available to us here, which is the opposite of what we were expecting. i guess that's why we were advised not to have any expectations.

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14 April 2009 @ 10:05 pm

sorry it's been a while, live journal just decided to work for us again!

4-5-09 sunday: ok, now i remember why i do this...

today's lessons went very well... thank goodness. my playway kids were on fire today! they remembered all of the vocabulary from last week and they got the new words very quickly. i was supposed to make up a chant/song for them so that they could rememeber the new clothing words i gave them... but it kind of slipped my mind. fortunately, a stroke of genius was bestowed upon me and i created a chant on the spot! and it worked! i had to rhyme "coat" with "go," which is something that i'd normally have serious issues with, but here it served a great purpose. one of the biggest obstacles that our students have with pronunciation is saying words that end in hard consonant sounds. instead of saying "bike" they say "bike-uh" and instead of "coat" they say "coa-tuh." so having the "coat" and "go" rhyme helped them to eliminate that extra "uh" sound. great success!

my class with tiger went excpetionally well, also. he was having a good day, so that enabled the class to run smoothly. again, thank goodness. my saturday was so hellish, i really needed today in order to keep sane.

my last class almost killed me, as usual. this week, instead of smacking my butt, they kicked my shins. i had had enough. i went to the two kickers, picked them up by their blouses (yes, the worst ones are the girls... what planet am i on?) and forcefully put them in their seats. interestingly enough, one cried and the other laughed in my face. hm. the local teachers are permitted to strike their students, but the foreign teachers are not. it's probably better this way, but sometimes the language barrier really hurts my ability to manage my classroom and apply discipline. next, i will resort to making them stand in the corner. i have never seen kids so misbehaved. previous to my arrival in china, i was under the impression that chinese children were all drone-like and robotic in the classroom. this may be so for their traditional week-day schooling, but it certainly isn't the case for their weekend studies at EF. so, i yelled along to the "hokey pokey" and tried (again) to teach the difference between "foot" and "feet" by doing a fun little dance involving the "can-can" that goes to the song of "foot, foot... feet, feet, feet!" they enjoy it. but afterwards only 30% of them can produce the words "foot" and "feet," which, i guess, is technically an improvement from the 20% that got it originally. then, a miracle occurred. i asked them to draw a monster. each student stopped fidgeting, fighting, screaming, sleeping, kicking, and crying and took out their pencils and did what i asked. the first time. with no questions. i cried. i actually teared up and went around the room, praising them and patting their little heads. when class was over, each of them walked up to me and showed me their monster. i asked them to describe their monsters to me. and in perfect english, they did so. "my monster is ugly. he has 4 eyes. he has curly hair. he is fat and short." these moments are golden. i have been screaming adjectives and pronouns at these kids for a month and doing drills and playing games and singing songs, and i get nothing from them showing that they understand. and then this, they actually get it. and then they gathered their schoolbags and quietly left. what the heck happened? i don't care how it happened, i'm just grateful that it finally did.

after school, we went grocery shopping with liviu, and came home to make a chicken stew. it turned out really well. tonight, liviu taught us how to play "canasta," which is pretty much like a souped up italian version of rummy 500. zack and i were on one team, and anne and liviu were on the other. we played for 4 hours until we fainlly won! hooray!

yesterday was mike and crystal's (zack's brother) wedding. i felt so bad that we weren't there to celebrate with them. but, we did hold a toast in their honor. we wish you the very best of luck, and i'm so happy that i will one day call the both of you my family. :)

4-6-09 monday: a day of recovery

we spent the day hanging out at the apartment and doing a lot of grocery shopping. liviu came over in the evening, and we stayed up late while he talked at us. liviu will be 52 soon, and he's traveled all over the world. he has the most amazing stories.

4-7-09 tuesday: a gorgeous park

we woke up early and walked with anne to school to meet doris and helen (local teachers) to visit a park. we took a taxi to the bus station, and then took the bus for about an hour and a half to a park past eastern hollywood (i found out that the locals call it "chinawood" which i find to be much more hilarious than "eastern hollywood.).

the park is was absolutely beautiful. little rickety bridges, stone paths, waterfalls, rivers... all of it amazing. there were a couple little villages in the park as well. they earn their livings via farming and selling woven nylon shoes to tourists. in this park, there is a very shallow river with a level and smooth bed. the popular thing to do there is take off your shoes and put on the woven ones and walk in the river. at some points, there are arbors with swings and flowering vines. i can't wait to go back when the weather is warmer. along the way, we stopped at one of the villages and ate lunch. everything we ate was grown on their farm or found in the woods. we drank "wild tea," and feasted on a couple varieties of wild mushrooms, sun-dried potatoe crisps, river fish, and some kind of bitter greens. everything was simple, yet delicious.

really, words can't describe the place... please be sure to check out the pictures.

then, we missed the bus back to yiwu, so we went back by taxi. the driver kept talking to me through doris, inquiring over and over again about my marital status. i kept on pointing to zack and then to my ring, but he wasn't getting it. i then proceeded to impress him with my ability to state my name and count to 10 in chinese. oh my. all in all, i'm glad we took a taxi home, because the bus we took to get there was lacking a suspension system. let's say it was a bit of a bumpy ride.

we went food shopping yet again when we got back to yiwu. then, zack cooked a beef, onion, pepper, and pineapple teriaki dish for me. mmmmm....

4-8-09 wednesday: heat wave

it was a beautiful, warm, and sunny day today! i wore a short-sleeved dress today, and was still warm. it was a welcomed change to the usual dreary, reainy yiwu we've come to know. it was a bit warm, and it makes me nervous to see all the locals running around in long sleeves and heavy coats. to them, this is still cool weather. it's still coat weather for them, while here i am, sweating in a light dress. it makes me panic at the thought of what the summer will be like. i'm definitely in trouble.

i spent the morning and early afternoon laying around, and zack tackled the laundry and posted the million pictures we have. then we headed to school around 2.

i had the chance to plan some of my lessons for the coming days, and zack dove into his work pretty hard, as well. i had a new class tonight, which went very well. all of the students were eager to speak and answer my questions. it's so refreshing to work in classroom full of people who care.

we finished around 9 and headed home, but made a quick stop at the market because we were craving dumplings. we scored on a couple of frozen packages. also, i've been wanting to buy soy milk, something i thought i would find really easily here, but i haven't had much luck. finally, i stopped looking for "pre-made" soy milk in a carton, and discovered the entire aisle of powdered soy milk. whee! the only bad thing about it is that the fat content per serving is really high. the kind i bought has 8 grams per cup. oh well, it's really tasty. the bag it comes in is pretty hilarious, too. chinese companies don't have a firm grasp on the passive voice that is used for giving instructions... let's put it that way...

then we watched a pirated version of the new x-men movie that was lacking some special effects... which really added to the experience. it made me realize how oblivious i am to how much cg is used in movies nowadays. being the first x-men movie i've ever seen, i was delighted by the story and characters as it was all new to me. zack has informed me that he has "the watchmen" series on his computer, so i'm going to start reading it. i've hated comic books and comic book related things for a while, but now i'm starting to get into them. i wish i would have done so when i was in high school or something. oh well. so, then we ate a bunch of dumplings that exploded hot oil all over my body and went to bed. i'm ok, but my shirt isn't.

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06 April 2009 @ 12:03 am

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3-30-09 monday: presto-change-o...

i spent the morning healing from my diseases and zack spent the morning and afternoon cleaning and rearranging the apartment. it looks so nice now!

we bummed around the house for most of the day, then we dressed up to go to pizza hut. it's one of the nicest restaurants in yiwu. it's not like the pizza huts at home. i mean, they have cloth napkins, nice silver, and steak. craziness. we got pasta with bolognese and a seafood thincrust pizza with octopus, smoked salmon, and calamari.... oh man, was it ever good!

then, we headed back towards the school to go to "tonight bar" for nikka's going away party. much beer and dancing were had. before going to the party, zack and i stopped at the centurymart to find "something blue" for nikka for her wedding. the only thing we were able to come up with was a little baby washcloth, oh well. she was pumped about it, so at least she was a good sport about it.

we danced to pink floyd and bon jovi.... oh boy. but we had a ball!

3-31-09 tuesday: hooray for hollywood!

today was a beautiful and sunny day! one of the local teachers, lucky, along with her boyfriend, kevin, took zack, anne, and me to "eastern hollywood." kevin was nice enough to rent a car for us so that we didn't have to take the bus. so, we all rode to hengdian for an hour and a half to eastern hollywood. we stopped for lunch at a little restaurant, where they are trying to put dishwashers out of their jobs. there is a picture describing what i mean. our sets of plates, bowls, glasses, etc were shrink-wrapped. so, i'm guessing that they send their dirty dishes out to a service, where they are washed and wrapped and then returned. whoa. the lunch was excellent! we had some really awesome cabbage that was presented in a fondue-like pot and fire set up. yummmmmm.....

eastern hollywood was amazing. the movies "hero," "house of flying daggers," and "the promise" were all filmed there. instead of using cg and sound stages for the scenery, the buildings from these movies are ACTUAL buildings! we walked through enormous towns and palaces and courtyards. enjoy the photos! oh, and we (well, mostly zack) was chased down by two chinese girls who were begging to have their photos taken with us... because we're... americans? i guess? it was crazy. people were taking pictures of us all over the place. weird.

on the way home, we stopped to climb 450 stairs that are a part of some famous political offical's tomb. at the top, you can look over the the entire city.

then we went grocery shopping with the goal of making spaghetti sauce for dinner. we did ok. oregano doesn't exist in china... neither does tomatoe paste. hrm. it was good though. sometimes, we really don't feel like eating chinese food. so, this was an acceptable and welcomed change. so, we had anne, liviu, and liviu's girlfriend lina (who happens to be his and my student.... yeah super awkward) over to share our pasta dinner. we found a baguette at the "break talk" inside the centurymart. bread talk has the most adorable cakes and pastries! they do a hello kitty cake that's in the shape of her head! with litle oranges for the bow between her ears!!!! arg! i'm so cuted out by it! oh and dennis! remember that hello kitty candy we got for you a while ago? i found the same exact candy at a store near our house. it made us have a pause to think about and miss you :(

4-1-09 wednesday: bargaining madness

today was our third day off in a row (because of the "tomb sweeping" holiday on sunday). we spent the day with lina and liviu driving around in lina's car to all the different markets in yiwu. our first stop was at the computer/electronics market. it's a huge expo-mart-like building with 4 floors with hundreds of vendors. they sell both real and knock-off computer stuffs. and the goal is to haggle your heart out. liviu was in the market for a portable hard drive and zack was looking for speakers for the laptop. the both did pretty well! having lina there was awesome. liviu finally found a reasonably priced hard drive, and lina said "wait a minute." she had the vendor take it apart to make sure that he was buying an "original" product, and not one that had been messed with. good thing she had them do it, because it turned out that they had a poser model inside. so she made them replace the fake with the real deal. crazy.

then, we had a really nice lunch at a hotel. they had a salad bar!!!!! hooray!!!! the dressings were kind of strange, but it was so great to have a salad. we miss you eat n' park! i have a picture of our lunches... zack had a lamb steak and i had some crazy montage that included a hot pot with cabbage-wrapped imitation crab, and a hot plate with fried shrimp and a sunny-side-up egg. strange, but still delicious.

after lunch, we checked out a clothes market. it was totally insane. it was a dark and crowded building with dozens of rows of clothing vendors. again, haggling is the name of hte game. we weren't in the mood, so we left after a bit.

then, lina took us to a carpet store where we purchased a 3x4 meter area of carpetting for our living room/kitchen. and they delivered it the next day.

later that evening, we visited the "night market" for the first time. this is a really popular market. every night, a block of the city is closed to traffic and hundreds of vendors set up shop. it is absolutely insane. i mean, it was a wednesday night, and there were people packed into this place like it was a one-time event. here, you can buy anything imaginable. i stress ANYTHING. pirated dvds, computers, cell phones, kettles, animals, fruit, household appliances, clothing, shoes, whatever. another thing they have are many varieties of disfigured beggars. there was a guy sitting in the middle of the street whose legs were bent at the hip and behind his head. his toes were falling off. and sat there and moaned at the passers-by, shaking his pan. eesh. there were a lot of creepy guys who followed us around, murming "computer, computer," like it was a code for drugs or something. zack bought a bunch of shirts for super-cheap. and they haven't fallen apart yet, so that's a bonus. we also bought a huge poster of a classic chinese painting for the living room, and itonly ran us 10 yuan. liviu kept us laughing with his haggling tactics. he sure does have a way with the chinese folk. his main attack is centered around insulting the vendor as much as possible, then we proceeds with the bargaining. he has a pretty good success rate, so it works. i'm still not too comfortable with making an ass of myself (or the vendors), so i walked away empty-handed.

lina picked us up and took us home, and we were very proud of our purchases.

4-2-09 thursday: teaching grown-ups

our carpet was delivered early in the morning. we woke up to a phone-call from the driver who told us the day before that he had a grasp on the english language..... wrong! he called us 3 times, i think he was hoping for us to have known more chinese with each time he called..... wrong! zack ran outside and found him, thankfully and we got our carpet. he told us that, for 32 yuan more, he would glue it to our floor for us. "oh, thanks... but no...," we said. kinda weird.

lessons started at 1 pm for me. i had a new vip, linda, and she was a delight. she is in her late 30s, and she is going to america in august to go to a bunch of trade shows for her company. she works in the trashy jewelry business, and her boss wants to learn from the americans how to sell their products more effectively. i wanted to tell her that it was probably a waste of time and money... but oh well. she is a fearless speaker, which isi such a beautiful thing. she just throws herself out there and begs for me to correct her. it's a teacher's dream.

then i had my adult classes. it was my first time teaching adults in a classroom (aside from workshops, which don't really count). i had a great time! my lessons went really well and i had a lot of positive feedback from the students. the only complaint was that i introduced too many new vocabulary words. they said "you teach us too much!," which i guess isn't as bad as "not teaching them enough." one of the local teachers, jennifer, has requested to sit in my classes. and i love her for it. the other students give me the classic "i-don't-understand-you-and-i-knida-hate-you-for-it squint," and she sits up straight and smiles and nods enthusiastically at me for the hour and a half. god love her. i felt really pumped about how my evening went. the adults are, generally, really dedicated to learning, and this motivates me to enjoy myself while teaching. i swelled with the feeling of accomplishment afterward.

i finished my lessons at 9:30 pm, then went to zappata bar to welcome one of the old teachers back to yiwu. conor, from england, has been in china for 4 years and is a couple years older than us. he taught in yiwu for a while, now he's in jinhua teaching at the new school. it was awesome to sit with him and pick his brain for a few hours. we did a lot of drinking, pool playing, duck-neck eating, and dice gaming. in china, they call this game "the dice game," and it's the same one that is played in one of the "pirates of the caribbean" movies. basically, each player has a cup with some dice, and you have to guess the quantity of the numbers present on the table and call the other players' bluffs. it's really fun, and a great drinking game. after about a half an hour of playing, conor said "ok, now we'll play in chinese." "yeah, right," i thought. but i did it. half-drunk sarah learned how to count to 10 as well as how to quantify objects in chinese. i felt, and still feel, very accomplished. then our designated driver, cornel, took all the tipsy foreigners home... at 3 am.

4-3-09 friday: a looooooong day

our day started at 7 am. bleh. we had to be at school at 8:30, so that sophie could take us to the police station to pick up our passports. joyous. conor was supposed to come with us (that's the reason he was in town for the day), but he was passed-out too hard to hear our 100 phone calls we made to him. oh well for him.

we went home, and i took a massive nap. poor zack slept for about 45 minutes then had to go to school for lessons.

i came in at 3 pm, and was assulted by my co-teachers to make our lesson plans for the weekend. i co-teach 6 classes, so this was fun.

then, i held an afternoon tea, during which we played "taboo" and it was painful, yet fun. getting them to participate was like pulling teeth. but oh well. then we talked about tibet, a topic that i thought would be of interest to them... but they all admitted to not caring about it. so, that was a lost cause. so, i decided to talk about "the wizard of oz" for some reason, but none of them had heard of it. and i was amazed. they recognized "somewhere over the rainbow" when i sang it for them, but didn't know what it was from. no wonder this country has so many problems.

at 6 pm, i had my favorite class: playway 1. these are the youngest students at ef, ranging from 3-5 years old. and i love them all. really, they are so amazing. so i sang and danced and had a ball. i had a new student, so this means that i got to give him his first english name. i named him "lewie," after my dad. awwww... he chased me around after class, flirting with me.

i spent the rest of the night at school waiting for zack to finish. the guy is such a champ. cornel needed someone to cover 2 of the evening classes, and zack jumped right in. while he was teaching his butt off, i ran back and forth to centurymart buying office supplies to organize our cabinets. i feel so good about my little filing system!

pooped, we trudged home, hoping that a grocery store was still open so that we could buy some ingredients for our dinner... but no luck. we stopped at the corner eucalyptus and picked up some "UFOs," which are beefed-up cup o' noodle things shaped like flying saucers. they're 3 yuan a piece, so you can't beat that.

we finished watching "audition," a creepy japanese film about a quiet girl who goes nuts and tortures her new boyfriend. i recommend it if you're looking for a gorey weirdo movie.

then i talked to my parents and fell asleep around 1 am. woo.

4-4-09 saturday: why am i doing this again?

the day of teaching started at 10 am for me and 8:30 am for zack. it was his first day of teaching kids, and he said that it went well.

i had a lot of fun with my first 2 classes. i have a couple of pictures of my one class tracing eachother's bodies to help them learn their body parts. and they demanded the "okey dokie" (hokey pokey), so we did it up.

then came the jerks. the trailblazers... they make me hate my job. they're 11-13... and they get really angry whenever i ask them to do anything. i mean, i was asking questions and playing games, and they refused to stand up or speak or answer questions... even when i called on them individually. i would say "charlie, what is this?" and he would shake his head. this happened over and over for 4 hours. just kill me. for an icebreaker, i did the "cha-cha slide" with them. oh boy, they hated it so much. i thought it would have been fun for them, i definitely thought wrong. i went over all of the motions and demonstrated the dance for them. they wouldn't do anything. they just stared at me and snickered. jerks. i almost cried. i have this class alone, and my partner, andy, has the same level at the same time. so we switch classes halfway through, and his kids were even worse. ugh. and andy says that he has no problems with any of them. boo.

then i hung out in the teacher's office and helped all the kids to memorize their speeches for the "language competition" the next day, while zack taught a bunch of classes.

before going we home, we hit up zapata bar with liviu and kim. we drank a million beers and zack continued to express his love for pool. he's getting pretty good. he beat liviu and me a bunch, then the ultimate challenge occurred: china vs. america. this little chinese dude approached zack with some of his cronies and was like "it's on like donkey kong." he didn't actually say that, but it would be a lot cooler if he did. zack lost and shamed our country, and there's a celebratory photo. then liviu beat zack in the transylvania vs. america. it was a sad day for the u.s.

so, then it was time to go home... and man, was it pouring outside. so, the 3 of us trudged home in the downpour, and there wasn't a taxi in sight. zack and i closed the evening by dancing in the rain outside of our apartment. then we went upstairs to ring out our shoes, pants, and coats. ah, yes, the china life.

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30 March 2009 @ 04:17 am

(no subject)

3-29-09 sunday: an all-around crappy day

i forgot to mention that on saturday morning, destiny made a special trip to school so that she could bring breakfast for zack and me. she has been emailing me and telling me that we aren't eating enough and that she wants to help us. awwwwwww...... also, she has been very curious about how real coffee tastes. so, zack brewed us some during our lesson on friday. her face was so cute. it was like the bitter beer face mixed with the "i'm being polite" face. she said she thought it would be sweet. but she said she understands why americans like it so much. :)

this morning i woke up and felt so incredibly ill. i had recovered from my last cold, and that lasted for about a day and a half... now i'm sick all over again. i called the school and told them i couldn't come in for my morning classes and that i would be in at 1 pm, then i would go to the hospital afterward. so, i slept a bit longer and zack went off to school.

zack came back around noon and got me up so i could face the afternoon hell-spawn class.

these kids make me crazy. they're 9-12. i've never had much luck working with this age group. i'm not sure why. it's just that 3-year period of life that i don't understand. i don't know how to talk to them, i don't know what they're interested in, and i don't know how to teach them. there are 3 girls and 4 boys. the girls (lily, snoopy, and jenny) are angels and they pay attention, but they still think that i'm this lame-ass american who shoudl realy learn some chinese. the boys (oliver, levi, charlie, and tiger) make me want to stab hot spoons into my eyes. actually, oliver is a really good student. levi spends the entirety of class trying to master the technique of reading a comic book by palcing it inside of a text book to make it look like one is totally paying attention. i caught him within the first 5 seconds of class and asked him not to do it. he persisted to read the comic, then i took it away. then he pulled out ANOTHER comic from his bag. i took his bag. then he pouted at me for the rest of the 4 hours. joy. charlie is just the "village idiot" who is easily distracted and influenced by the others. tiger is a thorn in my side. he is a constant disruption. and he apparently calls me some pretty nasty stuff in chinese... and this is hilarious to the other kids because i, of course, have no idea what he's saying. as his bad behavior continued, i gradually took points away from him. and i made sure to not isolate him or make too big of a deal about it and i was trying to be an effective classroom manager. then, he stood up and threw his desk across the room. i used a stern tone with him and took all of his points away. (this all happened in the first half an hour of the 3 hours i spend with them). then, the weirdness occurred.

most kids would get upset about it and sulk for a bit, but then they get back into the flow of class: they either do what they're supposed to be doing or they revert back to being a disruption. but no, tiger actively sulked for the remaining time. he wouldn't look at me or the other students or acknowledge any of us talking to him. we played a ton of games and sang songs and were doing all kinds of fun stuff and i kept encouraging him to get involved, but i got nothing.

last week, tiger came to class straight from the doctor. he was being treated for something using an iv drip. i don't know. i could tell that he wasn't feeling well yesterday, so it made me feel bad for being harsh with him. but what am i supposed to do? if he's ill and can't behave in class, he should stay at home. i want him to learn because it's my job to make that happen, but he's interfering with the other students' learning. ugh.

then came the big class: the 16 unruly ones. my patience had been stretched pretty thin at this point, so i mustered up as much cheerfulness as possible and attempted to teach some body parts. we painfully went through a review with flashcards, then we did "head, shoulders, knees, and toes." every time i bent over to touch my toes, 2 girls would creep up behind me and smack me in the back and butt as hard as they could. nice. i had planned to do the "hokey pokey," but my cd player didn't work. so, i decided to sing it. then i realized that they didn't know left and right. oh boy.

so, i taught them left and right and then we did the hokey pokey. so, that was also painful.

then, all the students decided to tackle eachother and cry. joy.

following this was supposed to be a workshop for kids that involved making portraits of their families out of leaves and grass. ok. but, unfortunately, only 3 kids showed up so we cancelled. whew.

then, it was off to the hospital. in china, there aren't any doctor's offices. if you are sick, you go to the hospital. no family doctors. sophie took zack and me via taxi to the "good" hospital. it looked like an old post office lobby, with receptionists behind bars. we checked in and i was issued a little health booklette and a bar-code card. we waited a minute in the lobby and were able to gaze upon the photos of the medical attrocities that this hospital has seen through the years. wow. huge color photos of dismembered people with the before and after pictures. and when i say after, i mean like 10 minutes after treatment. ugh. this was really gorey stuff. metal chunks stuck in people's heads, huge tumors, and the like. then, i was brought to a dark and dingey room with a doctor and 4 other patients. the doctor sat at a wooden computer desk and his patient sat to his left on a little wooden stool. so, there's no privacy going on here. patients are examined in front of the other patients. no hand-washing happens in between patients. and they have the old-school themometers here.... the one's with the mercury. the doctor spent a lot of time shaking them and then shoving them into his patients' armpits. thankfully, he didn't think that my temperature needed to be taken. i talked through sophie to tell the doctor that my head, ears, and throat hurt and that i have a cough. he listened to my heart and lungs. then he pulled a tongue depresser out of a little banged-up metal box on the computer desk and shoved it in my mouth and looked into it using a house-hold-type flashlight.

then the hilarity started. he asked me if i wanted to receive my medication in the iv drip form or in pill form. i abruptly and forcefully blurted out "pills, for the love of god pills!" to which the other instigators/patients scolded me, saying "no no! take the injection! it's much better!" i politely said no. they pressed on. and on. ok. hang on a minute. first of all, i'm in a hospital that doesn't encourage privacy or handwashing. the doctor didn't look at my ear. i had to insist that he write down somewhere that i have an allergy to sulfa. i'm not letting these people hook me up to an iv. hell no. and who are these other people? what if i were a hemophiliac, and that's why i didn't want the iv. and to have only one treatment of this iv drip, that must be some powerful stuff! who knows how i'd react to it. and what if one dose didn;t clear it up, and then my illness would get worse? the obvious choice here is pre-packaged, not-touched-by these-people drugs.

all-in-all, it could have gone a lot worse. i mean, she did take us to the "good" hospital. cost-wise, it was really good. to be seen by the doctor, plus my meds, plus being a new patient cost my 59 yuan ($8.63). and the barcode card that i was given will serve as my medical record. if i have to go to the hospital again, they will scan my card and my information will be there. so, that's pretty cool. but yeah, i have even more motivation for not getting sick...

when we got home, i had a good cry on zack's shoulder as i tried to let the crappiness of the day go away. he made me tomatoe beef curry. and this made me so so happy.

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28 March 2009 @ 10:47 am

herro, teacher say-rah!

3-25-09 wednesday: pay day!

this was our first pay day! we celebrated by buying a coffee press at starbucks. it ran us 268 yuan ($39). but it's definitely worth it to us. we're so proud of it, that i posted a picture of it on shutterfly. there are some photos of the crazy bakery that we pass on our way to starbucks. multi-layer-tastic.

we did lessons and stuff. it was too long along to remember. moops.

3-26-09 thursday: i don't understand the way people eat here.

my student, destiny, has been inviting me to her father's restaurant since the first day we started lessons together. so, today was the day! we met her at 11:30 am at the school and we all took a taxi to her father's restaurant at the other side of town.

now, zack and i were expecting a hole-in-the-eall type of place. i mean, this is china. almost everything looks like a shack. this restaurant was beautiful. it had high ceilings and was nicely lit. it didn't smell bad either. we had an enormous lunch! roast duck, tofu soup, fried sweet dumplings, orange-glazed ribs, cow's feet, garlic and chile fish, and oranges. all of this for the 3 of us. and we washed it down with hot soy milk and tea. i had to take a picture of the table because it was so crazy.

after lunch, destiny took us to a little hut outside of the restaurant. an indian man was inside, and he offered to make us some bread called "parota." i asked him to make his favorite for me, so he made me a banana parota. holy man. the guy started out with a ball of dough smaller than his fist, then proceeded to stretch it out to about 3 square feet. and he got all fancy by flipping it into the air and behind his back. then diced bananas, raw sugar, and oil were tossed onto the thinner-than-paper dough. this was then folded several times into a square about 8"x8" and then fried on a flat-top. it was basically hand-made philo pastry with bananas. i'm drolling all over the place just thinking about it. oh, there's a picture of the parota making on the site.

suffed to the gills, we were escorted to destiny's father's mercedes benz and then were taken to a nearby park to play tennis. so, we just ate like 60 different animals and then some fried dough. it was in the 80s and the sun was shining and beautiful. unfortunately, all of these things put together make for really pathetic tennis playing. but we had a ball. it was the first time zack had ever played tennis, and he was a champ. destiny's dad was awesome at it, and destiny told us that he's never held a racket before. eesh. there are some pictures of her and me looking super-talented.

after the hour was us, they took us back to the school because we had school stuff. we were blown away by her dad's car. he had 3 tv screens in the car... one in the dashboard (which turns off while your driving and automatically back on when you're at a stoplight) and two on the backs of the front seats. and he was playing all these weird music videos. truly spectacular.

school, stuff....

then we snagged some wine and chinese moonshine. this stuff is serious, and at $1 a bottle, we couldn't resist. it's 52% alcohol, but it's pretty smooth. and the taste of it is a bit floral and bit moldy. this is a definite improvement from american moonshine, in my opinion. i had a brief encounter with it about a year ago, and the end result was me laying face-down in the hallway of our apartment... not wearing pants. then i made friends with the toilet for the rest of the night. it was us, liviu, cornel, anne and one of liviu's lady-friends. and we carried on and on and on into the night. i made the mistake of letting myself drink too man different things on this night. there was the moonshine and orange juice, red wine, champagne, beer, and bailey's. yeah, it was me and my porcelain friend hanging out for a while after that. the only thing i could think about while i was revisiting my lunch was "man, i'm so glad that we have a westernized toilet." if i had to puke into a hole in the ground while laying on the floor, i think i would die.

it was a fun night.

3-27-09 friday: not being able to go to your sink and get a drink of water is somewhat inconvenient

as you can imagine, i woke up pretty hungover. all i really wanted was a glass of water... but our water tower is out for right now and we need to refill it. so, i got up and stumbled outdoors into the terrential downpour. luckily, there is that little market like 30 seconds from our apartment, so i bought 4 bottles of water and a can of pepsi. it was a struggle to not down all of them at the same time.

we went to our friday academic meeting, which was hilarious as usual. this week, cornel had all of the foreign teachers stay after to talk about "our behavior." the one guy, eric, from somewhere in maine (his accent sounds like he's from england and has a touch of downs syndrome, so i don't know if he's lying about where he's from or what...) has been a big problem at school. cornel has talked to him privately, but i guess he just decided to take a new approach. eric sleeps in the teachers' office... during school hours... every day. it's so weird. and parents are starting to complain about it. and so cornel non-directly asks that teachers don't do this because it's unprofessional. eric flips the heck out. everyone thinks that he is the worst teacher that we have. oh, and he's also secretly seeing another member of staff.... this gets you fired at our school. he's all like "i pour my heart and soul into this school and i get tired. i deserve to take a nap!" yikes. meetings are awesome.

then, i had my last session with my destiny. she was really bummed about it, and so was i. she was my first student here, and i made sure to let her know how special she is to me.

then we had lessons and workshops. we're really starting to dislike these workshops. i mean, the students are so unresponsive. i get it though. they're young and tired and don't have enough time to go home in between their classes, so they sit around at the workshops and talk to eachother. i wouldn't care if they spoke to eachother using english. i would also like it very much if they didn't sit in the front row and talk through the ENTIRETY OF MY WORKSHOP!!!! EVERY TIME!!! ugh, it makes me crazy. they are adults! i don't feel like it's my place to correct them. i don't understand it. i mean, they could leave, or do something else. but they are there by their own free will. the workshops are free for students. they don't have to be there! GO AWAY!!!! sorry.

we came home and talked to my parents for a while, and they're sending us a package! i'm so excited!

3-28-09 saturday: that's what it's all about.

oh yeah, i did "the hokey pokey" with my students today. and they lost their minds over it. we were learning body parts, so i found it to be appropriate. they've all done "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" a 1000 times, so this rocked their world a bit. all in all, my lessons went really well today. and it made us all smile.

after my classes, zack and i took andy (a crazy-awesome local teacher with a firm grasp on english) to help us get a cell phone. it was confusing, but inexpensive and now we can make local calls. huzzah! then we had some mcdonalds. it's hard to resist after eating so many noodle and rice meals.

then, i took it upon myself to clean the teachers' office for the rest of the day and into the evening. bleh. it was crazy, it it will most likely be a disaster all over again by tomorrow night. oh well.

now we're at home and i'm getting myself pyched up for my first day of teaching alone tomorrow. i've spent all week on my lesson plans, let's hope it goes somewhat gracefully.

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25 March 2009 @ 07:50 am

i'm in love with days off!

3-23-09 monday: heavy-duty cleaning

today i woke up early and cleaned the apartment until it hurt. i scrubbed all of the floors old-fashioned-style on my hands and knees with a little sponge and a basin of water mixed with laundry detergent. this made me so happy. seriously.

then i did laundry, which is still fun for the time being. sitting on the washing machine so that it doesn't go flying across the apartment hasn't lost its charm for me... yet. and then i started scrubbing other things around the house like our table, the walls, and the tv. once i start cleaning, i go into this trance-like state. luckily zack slept through most of it.

then zack and i just vegged out and watched movies that he had downloaded.

3-24-09 tuesday: man, we're so official

the morning started out with talking to my folks, which is always fun. cornel and liviu checked up on us again while i was talking to my parents and they got to "meet" one another. cornel and liviu are still telling us how lovely my parents are. :)

then, we met sophie and liviu at school to get through the last of our legal processes: obtaining a residence permit at the police station. i don't know what it is with these governmental establishments... but every time we have to go to one, the entire population of the sick, the old, the mentally-insane, and the generally downtrodden and crusty are in our company. it seems that only the really tough-looking folk get to be "processed" in this town. so we spent a decent amount of time this afternoon being stuffed into hallways and lines with a lot of coughing and pissed-off looking people. we had to have our photos taken (again) because we had the wrong-sized photos (again). then our passports were taken from us, along with our expert permits and our residence permits. these all got tossed into a pile, and this made me utter a much-too-audible whimper. "we're not getting those back," i said. sophie smiled and patted my arm the way she does so often as said "is ok." so, if it all hits the fan, i'm coming after her.

documents here are tossed around so carelessly. it really freaks me out. i mean, the agent who was handling our registration just threw all of our irreplaceable documents onto a pile of other people's irreplaceable documents. this is really unsettling. but it's how this is done. >sigh<

after our last "procession" we went grocery shopping.

then i took the laundry off the clothesline and polished all of our shoes that could be polished with black polish. then, i clumsily dropped the can of polish from our 3rd floor balcony. it landed polish-side up, which was cool. zack ran down to retrieve it and ran across the street for more beers. yes, there is a eucalyptus market about 20 yards from our front door! mwahahah!

more movie watching and beer drinking followed.

then, i snuck into the kitchen and cooked dinner. zack is usually the one that cooks, and i never mind. but it occurred to me that i haven't really cooked anything since a month before we moved out of our apartment in mt. oliver. so, i got down to business. donning the very cute green plaid apron that someone who is super-awesome gave to me as a parting gift, i concocted a chicken, tofu, onion, and baby-bokchoy stirfry dish with spicy peanut-soy sauce. it made the both of us smile with our bellies!

more movie watching and beer drinking followed.

i love having literal "days off."

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23 March 2009 @ 11:16 pm

working for the weekend!

3-21-09 saturday: her name is maisy....

i co-taught all day today. it went superbly well! the students are taking a liking to me and i have been enjoying my work with them very much. today, i taught more adjectives, family members, counting by 10s, and the ever-so-dreaded "maisy" song.

the maisy song goes like:

her name is maisy, and she's so crazy 'bout yellow yellow yellow yellow, here we go! she's got yellow jeans and she's got yellow socks. she's got a yellow t-shirt and she's got yellow shoes. she's got a yellow sofa and she's got a yellow lamp. she's got yellow curtains and she's got yellow chairs. oh mind ya maisy, i'm not not so crazy bout yellow yellow yellow yellow oh no no no no no no.

what the heck is this garbage? i don't know. we're using it in conjunction with teaching furniture and stuff that's in a living room... this lesson being for the playway kids (4-6 years old). i think that it is a terrible song to begin with, but on top of that, it doesn't put anything in context. the only thing that we know about this stuff is that it's yellow. anything could be yellow. it doesn't help the kids to know what these things are, and i'm sure they're confused about what's going on with this maisy character. at least i'm confused about her.

also, i successfully got my 9 year old boys to get the difference in the pronunciation between 30 and 13, 40 and 14 and so on. i was so pumped!

zack spent his day in jinhua at the new school's grand opening. he issued several placement test and was the focus of several photo-opps. i think he served well as a marketing puppet.

i spent the majority of the day feeling ill and missing zack. it was really nice when he finally came home all sweaty from wearing a suit all day then running home to see me. he's my favorite.

3-22-09 sunday: p-i-z-z-a

another long day of co-teaching with nikka. i spent a lot of the day correcting her grammar, which i feel really bad about doing to a colleague... but i mean she was teaching incorrect sentence structures to the kids. which drove me crazy. the sentence was supposed to be "tomorrow, he's/she's going to (insert activity)." instead, she wrote "tomorrow he's/she's does is going..." i was quiet for a minute, thinking that she would catch her error, but then went on to have the students recite it. i was like "NO! STOP!" i ran to the whiteboard like a mad woman and frantically erased it. now, i have let a lot of incorrect sentence structures and verb-subject agreements slip past, but i guess this was my tipping point. english isn't nikka's mother tongue, and i understand that she'll make mistakes. but seriously, if you're going to teach something, you should at least check to make sure you've got it right. anyway, she got really upset with me. she started arguing with me that she was right. i wrote the correct structure on the board and she still denied it. i don't want to sound like a jerk, but why wouldn't she take my word? i mean, it's my native language! eventually she just threw her hands up and said "whatever, fine... we'll do it your way." ugh... i really dislike this part of my job. i don't want to correct my peers because i'm some kind of language nazi, i just don't want them to teach their students incorrect grammar.

then came the class of demons. the previous sunday, this was the class that threw their shoes at one another. i was dreading them so much. but today, they were attentive and quiet. yay! i opened the class with a song. they've all sung the "bingo" song so many times, so i decided to put a spin on it. in pre-school, i learned a version of ":bingo" that used the word "pizza" instead. i remembered having a lot of fun with it, so i thought it would be fun for my students. so, i got in front of the class and all the parents peering into the classroom and totally forgot how the song went. i was like "there was a ..... man....who....made a ................food. and pizza was it's name-o!" a man, that made a food. i guess i could have done worse. they didn't understand anyway. i talked to my mom this morning, and she couldn't remember it either. we decided to make it "there was a chef who made a pie..." that at least sounds a bit better. anyway, the kids loved it. >sigh of relief< then we did adjectives followed by a fun matching game, family members involving chaotic running around for some reason, and then we ended with the botched "pizza" song. i made the mistake of letting the kids draw toppings on the pizza that i drew on the board. they were all wrestling eachother for the markers. oh well. at least they're eager to participate?

then we headed home, and zack died a little. he had unfortunately contracted my cold. and then all of the other teachers knocked on our door all night to insist that we go to the hospital. really, we just have colds. but they think we're seriously dying. it's nice to know that they've got our backs.

zack just handed me a cup of coffee what he made with boiling water, ground coffee, and a wash-cloth. the gods smile upon me!!!!

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21 March 2009 @ 03:23 am

lessons we are learning. some the hard way.

3-19-09 thursday: learn how to be a teacher

we woke up pretty early today at 6:30 and were driven to jinhua (where the new school is) for some training on how to be a teacher. i felt that this was strange, seeing that we're already teachers. almost the whole staff from our school attended. it was frightening how much the other teachers didn't know about the field of teaching. a lot of them went to school for something, but they don't have any kind of teaching certification. i'm not saying that i'm any kind of expert on teaching, but our little 3 weekend course gave us a little bit of a heads-up. the speaker leading the program was visibly frustrated with the teachers for not being able to keep up with him. the local teachers are still learning english themselves, and the speaker looked over this detail. eesh. so, it was a long day.

then, we headed back to yiwu and taught some evening classes. my new vip didn't show up, so i had most of the evening to myself. i have a lot going on this weekend, so i had some time to prepare myself.

and at 8 pm, i had my first successful workshop! hooray! my original plan was to talk about stress and stress management, but it turned into teacher sarah telling them every idiom i could think of. and the students had a blast! i really enjoyed acting them out and having the students guess what the heck i was talking about. afterward, several students personally thanked me for doing a workshop on idioms. they expressed to me that it is one of the most valuable things for them to learn. i'm so glad that i could help.

because zack is a very humble man, i think that i should talk about his success. cornel told him yesterday that he had been receiving wonderful feedback from his students. the best part is that cornel doesn't have to ask them. zack's students have been going out of their way to talk to cornel about how much they love zack's classes. i think that he's found his calling.

then we walked home and got some beers to celebrate our achievements.

3-20-09 friday: aka, don't put beer in the freezer and forget about it.

this morning we were really pissed off to find that our freezer had exploded. zack put the beer in the freezer to flash-cool it and the bottles exploded. at times like these, i really miss having paper towels. i mean, i'm sure that they exist somewhere, they're just hiding from us. cleaning up wasn't too bad, and it made me finally break down and do some mopping. the floors in our apartment are off-white, shiny tiles. they show every speck of dirt. bleh. i need to spent monday or tuesday doing the rest of the house. oh, and the wetroom needs some serious love as well.

i'm feeling a bit ill and hopefully the fluid in my head doesn't settle in my ear the way it tends to do. liviu says that i need to drink some hot whiskey and duke it out with my immunes system. if i weren't spending the better part of my weekend teaching little kids how to count, i may have considered this a bit more.

so, i had my vip with destiny at 1, and she's getting better and better! next week is her last week of tutoring and i'm really sad for it to be over. i really hope that i helped her enough to get a better score on her test.

then zack and i walked all over the place, trying to figure out where the starbucks is. we found it last week, but not this one. we were hoping to buy a coffee press and some ground coffee there. we've been really off from not having our caffiene. we found one lone bag of ground coffee at the tesco supermarket in jinhua. so, that was pretty exciting. but i think we'll be limited to buying our ground coffee from starbucks.

i had a workshop about how to act at a nice restaurant and that went really well. the students were upset to learn that dinners are not served family-style. and they got REALLY upset about there being a different fork and knife for every course. they said that americans are much too wasteful. then i taugh them how to order a steak. ha! they got all squeamish when i explained "rare." they were upset about the meat being bloody and said that eating something like that would for sure kill you. this, coming from the culture that eats duck tongue.

then liviu advised me to stop by his apartment to have some magic thai medicinal juice and bee pollen and a few beers. that would for sure make me feel better. bleh. the bee pollen he has is really good. but the crazy-juice was like a watery, high-alcohol-content, molasses. again, bleh.

one of the really good things about getting tipsy at liviu's apartment is that we have to up one flight of stairs and walk about 20 feet to get to our beds. it's a really good thing.

rice, propaganda-news on the tv, sleep.

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18 March 2009 @ 09:10 am

(no subject)

3-17-09 tuesday: a day off spent "off."

today was our second day off in a row. unfortunately, i spent the day being cranky because i was feeling a bit under the weather. i left the states feeling not quite 100%, and i was on an antibiotic fighting a pretty gruesome ear infection. and then 2 days before we left, i discovered that i had some sort of weird toe infection, so i had another antibiotic for that. despite the many pills i had been taking, my head-coldness still lingers.

but i'm happy to report that i'm feeling much better today, and i don't think i'll need to go to the hospital for yet another round of medicine. just keep your fingers crossed!

anyway, the day was spent watching really bad movies. namely, "djinn" and "confessions of a shopaholic." djinn was this trippy rendition of the arabian story of a big bad genie ruining the lives of seemigly happily married folks. confessions was too bad to finish.

then we headed down the street for some dinner. we had made-on-the-spot noodles with beef and green pepper. this was preceeded with pepper soup. ground black pepper, that is. it was gritty and brothy and black, but it was still edible. it definitely cleared out my sinuses!

after dinner, we hit up the corner mart for some beers. we settled for "cheerday" beer. it's main advertising point on the bottle was that it was made with water that is unpolluted and did not need to be filtered. hm. it was drinkable. and for about 18 cents a forty, we didn't complain.

laundry followed. i found out that if i sit on the washing machine, it keeps it from dancing across the floor during the spin cycles more effectively than trying to hold it in place with your hands. we're thinking about getting a dryer. they DO sell them in china, we just don't know how to get our hands on one. no one has them in their homes, but zack and i don't like the idea of line-drying clothing during monsoon season (which will be all summer long!)

oh, and happy saint patrick's day.

3-18-09 wednesday: paying the utilities chinese style.

at about 10 this morning, i awakened to the sound of fish falling from the sky. A man knocked on our door and demanded cardboard. We didn't have any so we pretended to sleep. He persisted, often calling out the word "Butter" in spanish. Eventually we had to let him in, at which point he raped our refridgerator and charged us 302 RMB. Anne wanted to talk about movies, but our hearts just weren't in it. Because of all the shouting, Cornel came up with a mattress to help shoo away the angry rapist. It worked, and as a token of our thanks, we gladly handed him some of the fish that had collected on our balcony. After our morning rituals, which included thai chi and begging in the streets for rent money, we put on some clothes and took a shower.

i want everyone to know, that the above story is not accurate. i was pulled away from my desk to do a placement test and zack took over. it's very creative and somewhat correct. at 10 this morning the landlord came to our apartment to collect our money for the utilities. he saw that we spoke no chinese, but persisted to speak chinese to us very loudly as he stormed through the apartment pointing at meters. in the end, we owed 302 RMB which is more than what we expected to owe for 2 weeks. it turns out that we should have been unplugging our water heater when we weren't showering. oops. this cost us quite a bit. we had cornel come up from the second floor to talk to the landlord and make sure he wasn't ripping us off. cornel assured us that everything was fine, and that we should unplug our shower. this is something that i had never imagined to be advised to do: unplug my shower. hm. while cornel was there, i asked him to come in and examine our "mattress" (aka, compressed wood slat covered in cloth and plastic wrap that we've been sleeping upon). he was really upset at what he saw. and immediately ran downstairs and fetched his own mattress off of his bed and gave it to us. what a guy. i'm pleased to let you know that it is much better and has some give to it. i'm thinking that, when i wake up in the morning, i won't have anymore bruises on my hips from my bones grinding my skin against the wooden, cloth-covered plank we had been sleeping upon previously.

then, zack did some research on thai chi, we took showers, and then got dressed. in that order. otherwise it may have been silly.

also, every morning, our neighborhood is visited by several men riding rickshaws equipt with loudspeakers with recorded messages. these messages are blared very very loudly, and each of them are demanding that the folk of the neighborhood bring out their various recyclable refuse items. these "recycling men" will give you a couple of (what it equates to) fractions of a cent for your garbage. and the messages that we hear sound a lot like "mantequilla," the spanish word for butter.

so, we headed to school and i had my date with destiny at 1 pm. this shy girl has fully come out of her shell for me. i am so thankful. she spent most of the hour and a half talking instead of me. she's progressing very well and she impressed the heck out of me with the speech that she wrote. she's taking the private tutoring so that she can get a better score on the IELTS test so that she can get into college in switzerland to study hotel management. last time she got a 4.5.... she needs a 5 to be accepted. so, it's my job to improve her speaking skills so that she can get over the 5 hump. the pressure is on for the both of us.

then we grabbed lunch from centurymart, which consisted of something similar to potatoe pancakes, some eggrolls, and some kind of flatbread covered in egg and onions. and we leisurely ate our lunch in the park.

then came a really long 40 minutes. i was to hold a workshop. every week, each teacher must hold 3-4 workshops or chat sessions and we get to choose the topics. i chose to have a workshop about trying on clothes. i felt that it was a useful thing to learn about. when i think of the word "workshop," i imagine a person leading other people in a process or activity and the followers do most of the work. haha. when english first says "workshop," they mean "go talk about something interesting for 40 minutes, the students like to hear you talk." i learned ef's meaning afterwards. so for 40 minutes, i struggled with my students to talk to me, do the fun little activities i planned, and then gave up. i started asking them what sorts of items they would be interested in buying if they made a trip to america. silence. i asked them about what they shop for in china. silence. i asked them if they could understand me or if i was speaking too quickly. again, silence. silence hurts me so deep in the classroom. the other teachers tell me that it is natural and that i'll get over it. right now, i truly lack the grace to do either of those things.

zack's workshop, which i sat in on, went extremely well. he did his on st. patrick's day. it was fascinating to watch because they had never heard of it before. and i had a really good time watching zack draw various animals, leprechauns, and clovers all over the board. this amused the students and kept them engaged.

then we walked home and i sulked about how i'm a failure at workshops. i tend to do this thing where if i'm not immediately good at something, i tear myself to shreds. i know this, and i guess knowing that i'm insane "indicates that you're not too far gone" (to quote lucy from "a charlie brown christmas.") so, i am going to try to tell myself to shut up and do it gooder.

and zack just handed me a bowl of rice, peppers, onions, eggplant, and bok choy that he made in his new wok. it smells wonderful, i think i'm done here.

whew.

3 comments | Leave a comment

16 March 2009 @ 11:20 pm

our address!

ok, here's the address for our school. i'd give you the address for our apartment, but we don't have a mailbox. even if we did, the chances of whatever is sent to us ending up in our possession are slim. i mean, our neighborhood doesn't have an institutionalized garbage pick-up. we simply put our garbage outside our door and about an hour later it's gone. people pick up trash, rummage through it for recyclables they can turn in for cash, and put the rest of it.... somewhere. so what i'm saying is, theft and looting and such are issues. here it is:

English First Training School

2nd Floor Dushi Garden

Xiuhu Square

Yiwu, P.R.China 322000

just make sure you send it attention zack and sarah.

also, sending liquids of any kind is right out. and if you send anything that comes in packaging, make sure that it is sealed and has not been opened. customs gets in a tizzy over such matters. so, stick to letters and photos and stuff.

much love!

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